The most shocking thing about this collection was how not completely awful it was. Olivier Lapidus’s debut last season, which I didn’t get to, has since been spoken of in almost reverential tones as a low-water mark of terribleness—down there with Kanye West’s Paris debut and Lindsay Lohan’s Ungaro moment. It prompted a Vanessa Friedman piece in The New York Times mercilessly headlined “How to Wreck a Brand in Three Years.” It sounded amazing.
Why so? Well, really wonderful fashion collections and shows are few and far between. You’ll be lucky to get four or five absolute stormers in a season. Even rarer, however, is the lesser-spotted fashion apocalypse, a toxic torpedo of a show so bad it’s unforgettable. These are collections—in a weird, twisted, and probably totally wrong way—that you kind of cherish. Especially if you get to write about them.
The good(ish) news for Lapidus and Lanvin is that this show was no such ruinous apocalypse. Most of it was eminently forgettable. The low points included some poorly cut drop-crotch flannel pants with a silk cummerbund, a biker jacket in an unlovely orange with an odd assaulted-neck-brace neckline, and stirrup pants (the same orange) whose stirrups were tied under the heel of the shoe: ugly. These were missteps, but nothing profoundly offensive.
Plus, the bags were good (especially the straps with built-in phone holders); the saw-soled python or leather boots were cool; and Looks 1, 16, and 24 worked pretty well. There is clearly still enough savoir faire within the house to make pieces beautifully, although the emphasis on heavy silks did little to help showcase that.
The enduring problem for Lanvin womenswear is not who the designer is, but who it isn’t. You know exactly who I mean. After him, poor Bouchra Jarrar did fair enough work, especially following her first collection, but wasn’t given enough time, something she surely deserved after shuttering her own label to take the gig. Now Lapidus has Lanvin, a label that recently seemed a fantastic chalice of all that is great in French fashion, but which now feels poisoned. The only way Lapidus can suck out that venom is to produce collections that are unforgettable in a good way and to do it consistently—for years. Today represented an improvement on his hastily assembled debut, but the angle of his ascent from last season’s abominable to this season’s meh is not nearly steep enough to suggest he’ll hit the required heights of unforgettable especially soon.
Neither of the two looks that generated faux-spontaneous applause at this show (a classic red flag for neurotic management) were among the better ones here, which perhaps suggests a taste vacuum at the top and among its claqueurs. The problems at Lanvin womenswear are absolutely not of Lapidus’s making, and he should not be blamed for them. But can he solve them? That’s a mighty big ask, which, again, went unsatisfactorily—but not so epically terribly as last season—unanswered today.
