Paris Couture 2024 or Paris Couture 1924
Steampunk Aesthetics and the Art of Observation in Paris Haute Couture Spring 2024
“Under Pont Alexandre III, bathed in the light of the first full moon of the year, Creative Director John Galliano captures a moment in time: a walk through the underbelly of Paris, offline. Intrigued by the voyeuristic portraiture of Brassaï, a focused awareness of our unnoticed surroundings unfolds: the night-time revellers one passes on a moonlit wander along the Seine, what lies beneath the imprints of their clothes, and what happens behind the dimly-lit windows of their homes.” - Maison Margiela Artisanal Collection 2024 Press Release
I wanted to start this post by mentioning the talk of the town which is the collection of John Galliano for Maison Margiela, a collection that will stay in the history of fashion and that will influence so many upcoming collections and creators. The influence of Galliano came from Brassaï; a 20s’ photographer that captured people’s lives in Paris like he was looking through the keyhole. Parisian life at the time, when Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Chanel, Proust, Hemingway and many many others were co-existing at the same place at the same time in a fuming city full of intellectual figures living the lifestyle that we think as tourists we will live just by one walk to Montmartre. This underground glam, between two wars is long gone, but our time has a lot more in common with the 20s than what we think. Some examples: political conflicts, huge inflation and as at that time they were living in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, we probably live in the aftermath of Technological Revolution.
I started thinking of this piece as a more steampunk type of article but what really steampunk is: a genre of science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology. As the “father of steampunk”, KW Jeter, called it “a science fiction set in a Victorian, industrial era” and let me tell you that, in this Haute Couture season we had both Victorian and Industrial. Starting digging and after having tagged thousands of Haute Couture pictures I realised that John Galliano was not the only one with this vision. This dimly-lit aesthetic, with exaggerated shapes was kind of a pattern in the runways of Haute Couture. Sometimes it’s not very obvious to the naked eye, but when you tag maniacally like I did, you realise that there are bits and pieces in most of the runways. One of my first pieces in Substack was the “Are we dressing up for a Great Depression?” and if I can be proud for one prediction, it would definitely be this, 6 months later we see the glimpses of this forecast appearing here and there.
Not a long ago we saw the collections of Dior and Chanel, capturing the Industrial Revolution period, with Chanel having a full show in Manchester, the place that saw the biggest growth and the biggest decay due to Industrial Revolution, the place that is characterised by that era and that even has a museum about it.
The same writer, KW Jeter, was the writer of Blade Runner, we could safely call him the specialist of Sci-Fi, and when I saw the Schiaparelli mother-board dress and mother-board baby, Cyberpunk is what I thought. What Steampunk and Cyberpunk have in common aesthetically? While their visual styles are distinct, both genres have a very defined and recognisable aesthetic. Steampunk merges Victorian-era fashion with industrial machinery, creating a retro-futuristic vibe. Cyberpunk is known for its neon-lit urban landscapes, cybernetic implants, and a general sense of high-tech life in a decaying society. Do I need to bring more examples? The new movie of Lanthimos with Emma Stone, “Poor Things”, a movie that already won many awards and had many heads turned has a total steampunk aesthetic. The clothes of the main character kind of define the scenes.
In 2024 we don’t have flying cars, neither we have inhabited other planets of our solar system, we still live in planet earth and we still destroy it day after day in a unique human way. We started exploring AI and we use it in a naive way, till now, and we are mostly living in a sedative lifestyle. But we have fashion to take us in a trip to literature and Sci-Fi on all these scenes that they were living in our imagination through the books of all the famous novelists and sci-fi writers.