At Charles de Vilmorin’s sophomore outing as an indie couturier, everyone was suspect, audience included. The concept, as the couturier explained it, was something like a Clue on ludes come to life in a haunted house: it’s a moonless night, there’s been a murder, there are no witnesses, and no one is presumed innocent. The first look, he noted, was Death. There followed an array of personalities—part Tim Burton, part Jekyll and Hyde, part Agatha Christie—but whomever the victim or the suspect might be was up to the viewer to judge.
Behind such Netflix-ian dystopia was a much-watched young designer, alone in his apartment, working intensely with four assistants for two solid months. “Ready-to-wear is one endeavor, but couture is really me,” de Vilmorin said in an interview before the show. In lieu of prints came jacquards in fanciful colors, feather arabesques and other flights of fancy produced in partnership with specialized couture embroiderers, feather workers, and milliners (the fringed showpiece hat in look 5, for example, was four and a half feet wide). It was a rollicking story, devised more for performance’s sake than reality: “It’s the first time I’ve done a collection without asking myself [commercial] questions—it was just for the pleasure of telling a story,” the designer allowed. Assisting him on the runway were friends including Noemie Lenoir, in an openwork knit dress with flamboyant sleeves, Suzi de Givenchy as a lady in red, and Marie-Agnes Gillot, dancing in an orange veil at the finale. While the designer’s love of color and craft is evident, curiously, a number of silhouettes bound the models’ arms to their body. It will be interesting to see where de Vilmorin will take his imaginary cast next, and how they might evolve to actually move in their clothes. Until then, the mystery remains intact.
