Whoever said narrative fashion is dead clearly hasn’t met Calvin Luo. The designer arrived at Paris Fashion Week with a fully realized ode to the city, its history, and its life. The collection was tripartite: First, Luo imagined a walk with his muses along the Boulevard des Capucines at around 8 p.m. in the ’80s or ’90s. Then, he arrived at rue Montmartre and swung into the ’60s and ’70s by 10 p.m. And come midnight he was on the rue Royale, rethinking the couture of the ’40s and ’50s. If it sounds a little Midnight in Paris–ish, that’s intentional; Woody Allen’s love letter romanticizing the city’s past served as Luo’s ideological jumping-off point.
But the point of Allen’s film is that one cannot successfully live in the past. In the clothing, Luo created modern updates to well-trod staples. Bourgeois blazers and pleated skirts were layered over disco paillettes. Western chevrons were cut in glamorous beaded fringe. A feather frock was in sorbet stripes, cut quite slim so a contemporary Adriana could shove her way through the crowded nightclubs of her own midnights. This kind of storytelling and compiling of eras, genres, and ideas didn’t always work—a gold-flecked ball skirt with a hipbone-baring leotard felt like a big stylistic stretch—but Luo deserves to be commended for setting the bar high for his Paris debut.
