Fantasy at Paris Fashion Week

PARIS (AP) — Looking at the shows that kicked off Paris’ haute couture week on Monday, you’d never know the world was in the midst of the most serious financial turmoil since the Great Depression. Designers delivered opulent, flamboyant collections that, instead of reflecting the gloomy economic reality, transported the viewer into a world of beauty and fantasy.

“My job is to make women dream,” Christian Dior designer John Galliano told The Associated Press. “Of course I’m aware of the credit crunch, but it is not a creative crunch — not at the house of Dior, anyway.”

Galliano sent out voluptuous skirt suits and sculptural evening gowns that took their inspiration from 17th century Dutch painters like Johannes Vermeer.

Giorgio Armani Privé, the celebrated Italian designer’s couture label, looked east for inspiration, delivering a distinctly Chinese-flavored collection.

Grand spectacles, the haute couture shows garner huge publicity for the handful of labels that still offer made-to-measure garments — which cost upward of $10,000 apiece.

Duchess lace, delicate blue-and-white porcelain and other Flemish fineries recovered their long-lost status as the ultimate luxury goods in Christian Dior’s majestic Vermeer-inspired show.

Designer Galliano said he was struck by the pose of subjects in paintings by the 17th century Dutch master and his contemporaries — and by their palette of luminous blues, yellows and creamy whites.

Ever the magpie, Galliano plucked pieces from the bourgeois Flemish wardrobe — the oversize lace collars, the droopy puff sleeves, the fitted bodices — and adapted them to the label’s hallmark skirt suit, which was created by Christian Dior in the ‘40s.

The notes proclaimed the spring-summer collection “More Dior than Dior,” and perhaps it just was. Wasp-waisted jackets with big sleeves and even bigger hips were paired with ultra-voluminous skirts that used bonework on the hems to retain their four-leaf clover shape.

Ruffles abounded, draped over jacket necklines, bouncing off the seat and dripping down hemlines. The skirt of one slate blue suit was entirely covered in looped ruffles. Indigo flowers on the inside of another skirt — in ecru — made the garment look like a Flemish porcelain bowl turned upside-down.

Armani delivered his “dream” of China — a glossy, sleek and sophisticated version of the Asian economic powerhouse. Lean skirt suits in luminous silks, embellished with tassels and appliqués dominated the collection. Glossy, second-skin evening gowns, heavy with sequins and beadwork, made up many of the remaining looks in the 62-outfit show.

Pointed shoulders and cuffs on jackets evoked pagoda roofs, while a purple and yellow pantsuit recalled a Chinese martial arts ensemble.

The dresses, in lacquer red and inky black, had a costume-like quality about them. The models wore severe black bobbed wigs or had their hair swept up into a long thin tower wrapped in black leather. They tottered down the catwalk in pencil skirts and towering, richly-worked heels.

Asked whether the collection was an overture to the emerging economic superpower, Armani said “There’s no point in bringing China to China.”

“This was a dream, a real spectacle, a film,” he said.

As usual with Lacroix, who avoids dictating any particular look, every single one of his 39 models was resolutely different from all the others. He struck a nautical note with jaunty blazers with rows of gilt buttons and scarlet trim, white cuffs peeping out beneath the sleeves, over low-slung trousers or even a delicate feather skirt.

A hand-painted vibrant pink puffball skirt jostled for attention with an electric blue lace bodice worn with black and white striped satin bloomers and a white silk cardigan jacket embroidered with pink carnations, the house’s fetish flower.

An off-the-shoulder black and white polka dot dress with dusty pastel pink flowers nestling in the cleavage was tied with a wide scarlet sash, while a watery blue silk moire bolero topped a dramatic grass green taffeta skirt.

The mood was joyful and upbeat, a tonic in these dark gloomy times. Lacroix cheerfully raced round the runway for his lap of honor, pelted as is traditional with the carnations left on the seats.