Olivier Theyskens used photos from Hans Bellmer’s famous fetish-y Doll series on dresses today. On the spectrum of suggestive sexual imagery—of which there’s been no shortage lately—Bellmer’s fairly sadistic work falls far to the kinky side of Christopher Kane’s Joy of Sex motifs from a season ago. On today of all days, with the partisan-in-the-extreme U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing and the future of American women’s reproductive rights hanging in the balance, the prints felt a little tone-deaf.
Bellmer aside, this collection found Theyskens digging into his source code. Previous runway shows of his have been more evenly split between tailoring and eveningwear. Here, he focused on his dressmaker side, channeling the high romance of his Rochas glory days with a lovely pair of gowns featuring double-tiered, crinolined skirts, and a special long black dress topped by a fitted velvet jacket tied with a baby blue silk ribbon at the neck.
Theyskens’s almost prim skirt suits were accessorized with airy, floaty harnesses that looked like backpacks from the front. The point seemed to be to lend a note of utility to otherwise fairly demure silhouettes. Or else he wanted to create a sense of flou. There was a refreshing sense of clarity to a basic long-sleeved LBD, which he fit softly through the waist without making it constrictive.
