For Saint Laurent to decree that the doors of its Eiffel Tower–backdrop spectacular show would close just 45 minutes after Olivier Theyskens’s much more modest offering was due to begin—30 minutes-ish across town at the tail end of rush hour—it was, of course, at liberty to do. Yet the act lacked fraternity. Because forced to choose between the two labels—one huge, one not—many editors regretfully bent to inequality.
With great sangfroid, Theyskens, preshow, declared himself unperturbed as his team said he would have to start at “7:00 p.m., 7:05 max”—the better to allow those who did keep the faith to rush from the Marais. The show began at 7:01, with plenty of bare benches. There was that slightly melancholic atmosphere you get at a sparsely attended end-of-run play.
Had the collection been a dud, then those viewerless seats would have been less of a shame, but a dud it most certainly was not. This reviewer is no Theyskens aficionado—I went to a few of his Theory shows and thought “meh”—so to see the designer at work exploring his core, long-term motifs felt fresh. In October, a six-month exhibition dedicated to the designer, titled “She Walks in Beauty,” opens at the Mode Museum in Antwerp, and in the milliseconds we had with Theyskens backstage before heading pell-mell to Saint Laurent, the designer said working on that show had inspired him to mine his origin story for this one. Dark and bright met in aspect (to gently misquote the source of Theyskens’s exhibition title) via high-slashed long dresses in liquidly black silks, sometimes fringed with soft lingerie breaths. Hook-and-eye fastenings gathered T-shirt necklines and hems. There was some less convincing tailoring, sure, but the dresses were the thing. Despite the interference of an enormous institution of great, great power—was Theyskens’s flocked Death Star T-shirt an oblique, side-eyed comment?—this collection was a success. In the end, we made it to Saint Laurent’s door at 7:44, and Lenny Kravitz rolled up at 8:01. Following a stellar first act, then a long but gone-wrong second, Theyskens deserves a crack at his third.
