A tent was erected in the shadow of the gold-leafed dome of Les Invalides for Guillaume Henry’s Nina Ricci show. It was pleasant to be outside on the first sunny day of Paris Fashion Week. Henry took the French Foreign Legion as a starting point this season, hence the location: Les Invalides in now a museum, but it was built by Louis XIV as an army hospital. Ricci and the Foreign Legion are an unusual pair; a Google search indicates that only one woman has ever served. This is the French house of feminine, pretty things, which makes Henry’s other talking points—Imperial India and Don Quixote—rather strange as well.
The show opened with a brass-buttoned jacket with big bellows pockets and hyperbolic squared-off shoulders, a logo belt, and white lace biker shorts. On paper it sounds implausible, but biker shorts have been trending in Paris. The tailoring borrowed elements of military finery, like epaulets heavy with silk fringe. If a coat or cape didn’t feature those epaulets, its shoulders followed the exaggerated lines of look one. The yellow version was even stenciled in black with Nina Ricci on the back. Pleated trousers and shorts grazed the upper ribs. These were puzzling choices, made more so by the models’ costume-like feather crowns and legionnaire’s caps.
Henry had more success with softer pieces, like a billowy crushed nylon coat with two columns of snap buttons and a white midi dress with a scarf wrapped a little like a sari around the neck. These hewed closer to what Nina Ricci has always stood for, while also looking like something that contemporary women might like to wear. As for much of the rest, it didn’t qualify.
