Alexandre Vauthier likes his design to be exact—and spectacular. For him, sharp tailoring and provocative slink are two faces of the same coin, as they are in the best French couture tradition of Jean Paul Gaultier and the late Manfred Thierry Mugler. Not surprisingly, Vauthier worked for both of those geniuses, and in his style there’s a definite echo of their penchants for the cerebral as well as for the sexual, for the constrictive as well as for indulgent excess.
Talking about excess, couture brings out the haute showman in Vauthier, his flair for showstopper pieces matched only by his incredible technical maîtrise. “It’s the Covid-19 paradox,” he joked backstage before the show. “There’s been a shortage of everything, so we had to come up with the most crazily inventive technical solutions to make the best out of the situation.” For one, his atelier handmade a version of thin, shiny feather-like rhodoïd fringes, which covered a see-through black fourreau, capturing the light and giving off a nocturnal bird-of-paradise vibe. A sort of clubbing Papageno, so to speak.
Vauthier gave the collection a rather seductive syncopated rhythm, playing over-the-top showstoppers shimmering with metallic silver sequins against strong suits of the strong oversized variety. “I wanted something extremely radical, very clean, électrique,” he offered, “something unilateral in its vocabulary.” Cue the reduced palette of stark black, a twisted-bourgeois shade of beige, a few shots of Yves Klein blue, and glimmers of silver, which let his mastery of cut and draping do the talking. The silhouettes alternated between sleek, slinky, and body-con, with revealing drapings stopping short of being overtly provocative, alongside trapeze or fluted asymmetrical shapes. Plays of frothy feathers and loose plissé panels added a further sensuous note to the already rather hot mix.
What anchored the collection were the boot/pant hybrids; worn with almost every tenue, that had a sort of illusory effect, as it was hard to determine if they were just slouchy boots or actually “pants crashing onto a shoe,” as the designer described them. Either way, they gave the looks an extra-dose of French cool, the ineffable vibe that Vauthier seems to have mastered.
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