Both shod in sharp-toed “Patti” ankle boots, Yolanda Hadid and Isabelle Huppert sat on either side of Virgil Abloh at a show that marked a step forward for Bruno Sialelli’s Lanvin. For several seasons now, this designer has paid dutiful lip service to the history of this house via painstakingly reworked logos but not much else. Today, he seemed at last awake to the beautiful value of Jeanne Lanvin’s legacy.
Sure, there were plenty of Sialelli’s favorite tailored outerwear pieces with oversized or fur-textured collars. Where Lanvin was a colorist, he is a collar-ist. However, these were less freighted with overelaborate styling (blessedly no sailor collars, although the helmet headpieces were iffy). When there was a “playful” accessory—a lipstick pendant, say, or a ceramic fox face bracelet—it was as often as not obscured by a collar or cuff as it was on display. The patisserie-box bags were straightforward gimmick pieces created to generate Insta-energy.
The soundtrack referenced the cinematic via the intro to Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! and Alfred Hitchcock’s plummily preposterous The Hour of Parting, and it was Sialelli’s experiments in sirenish femme fatale dressing, developed mostly in the latter half, that proved the star pieces here. Ingrid Bergman wore Lanvin in Notorious, Mary Pickford was a silent-movie-era client too, and today we saw some pieces that would grace their contemporary equivalents. The pearlescent bead-strapped dresses, long and fitted, served in both pistachio and black had something of Jeanne Lanvin’s Phèdre to them. The closing gridded crystal dresses were nailed-on scene-stealers. And the two long-at-the-back, knee-length-at-the-front dresses in black and white were arresting too. They had vaguely ergonomic, monochrome beaded contouring, and the white dress was patterned in cursive etched clovers. Also worth a shout-out was the sulphurously tropical green tailoring for women. The pancake makeup, garish red lip, and fake eyelashes were way too clownish against these looks: Bergman would never have accepted such a heavy-handed travesty. Still, this was Sialelli’s best-yet Lanvin collection.
