EXCERPT: SAINT LAURENT. RESORT 2024 - PARIS FASHION WEEK.

 

"...Yet, despite the hedonism and epicurean opulence of Vaccarello's Saint Laurent, there  also appears to be a stripping back of the late Yves Saint Laurent imprint.  Vaccarello's opulent and grandiose runway shows seem to have taken a slight step back from their over-the-top extravagance.  Could it be a moral undertaking? As the world, within a similarity of the First Cold War, which was close to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  Are we there again?  Yet, in our strange digitized simulacrum, and overconfidence that a globalized world through technology and 'smartphones' would set us all free.  Has come undone.  And as the striking similarities of what has occurred Forty years ago, is happening now.  There still is a portrayal that this is all just a temporary glitch.  And our threat, via distraction, is a clunky AI learning program that makes a lot of errors, who will kills us all. The reality is, it is us, humans that are the existential threat to humanity, and we are repeating the same old mistakes. Two major conflicts an ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Israel.  China bearing down on Taiwan.  Russia and NATO staging wargames to counter each other as a potential Nuclear armed threat.  Maybe Vaccarello is offering, through his new found minimalism, a degree of nihilistic laced humility.

And if this is the case, that an accepting, and what could be deemed as a way of counter culturing it all, in dealing with a tumultuous world is to embrace its chaos.  And there is underlying nonchalant care portrayed with Vaccarello's latest array, in its resignation to the dire predicaments of human folly, would be not to be consumed by it.  The starkness of the collection and it brutalist undertones, evokes an emotive cue, as one awaits within a concrete encased bomb shelter, whilst drinking a cosmopolitan (or Martini).    Is that all bad?  

As the late and great science fiction writer J.G. Ballard once said, "Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us."

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(A.Glass 2024)

Full review: chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/2024/01/saint-laurent-resort-2024-paris-fashion.html