There was no fanfare ahead of Olivier Theyskens’s presentation tonight. Stepping into the Palais Galliera, most of us expected a runway show, along the lines of what he was doing pre-COVID. What we got instead was 22 looks arranged on mannequins, each hand-made by Theyskens and his tiny team of assistants, and each one-of-a-kind. It was sublime.
Walking the circumference of the Palais’s rotunda, Theyskens said, “it’s a little bit of a special collection, because it took a year to do, and it’s been done entirely in my studio.” (Theyskens skipped the fall 2021 collections in February.) Most of the component pieces are fabric scraps or swatches of fabrics from mills he called “coupons.” His process involved patchworking those swatches, which he cut on the bias and arranged by color, print, or theme. Then “everything was cooked.” Cooked? “It’s crunched and under pressure, a little bit like what was done as a process by Fortuny.”
The silhouettes are close to the body, but because the scraps are cut on the bias, the results are surprisingly versatile. As willowy as the dresses look, and they do look willowy on the petite but tall mannequins, Theyskens reports that they stretched to accommodate his friends’ pregnant bellies during the development process. The real magic was in his arrangement of the fabric scraps. One dress was a symphony of pastels, another combined many, many shades of red, a third mixed up different prints and patterns in the Japanese boro style. The cooking procedure meant some of the colors bled into their neighbors, adding depth and dimension to the collages of fabric.
There’s also a hook-and-eye closure jacket and a naked dress, both embroidered with feathers. The naked dress was subject to the same washing process as the patchwork numbers, which gave its feathers an unusual texture. Because of the laborious hand work involved in the making of these pieces, large department store and e-commerce orders won’t be possible; they’ll be sold as one-offs to individual clients. Theyskens seemed genuinely sanguine about that arrangement. “I’d like to go back to working with factories,” he said with a laugh. “But this is a passion, a pleasure.” It showed.
