PARIS (AP) — Geo-political activism meets tuxedo jackets at Paris Fashion Week, as a Ukrainian-born designer brought her team of more than 20 people working in Kiev to a show that paid tribute to her country.
Here are some highlights from Wednesday’s fall-winter 2023-2024 ready-to-wear collections:
Ukrainian Litkovska goes “in the air”.
“From a war zone to peace,” read a sign outside Paris’s Grand Rex cinema, a model of New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
Inside, guests gathered in an art deco hall designed by Ukrainian designer Lila Litkovska, who continued the radio theme.
Titled “Up in the Air,” it was a metaphor for the unpredictable way life in Ukraine is unfolding by the minute. The ready-to-wear scene’s soundtrack slides between stations and cuts out constantly. Litkovska’s collection reflected this problem by mixing styles with a generally loose and over-the-top display.
There were more commercial looks, like a black tuxedo coat worn over a floppy black slit skirt and sneakers, and more subtle plays, like a black coat with long sleeves wrapped around the middle to deliberately create a kilt silhouette.
Simple menswear dresses were the cutest in the low-key show, with long straps of silk undergarments swinging gracefully behind like a train.
But this collection was not only about fashion. A video link near the airport showed live footage of Litkovska’s team in the Ukrainian capital.
Ukrainian fashion movement
In the year In Ukraine, “designs by moving studios to a safe place in the country.
“During the first week of the Russian invasion, we moved to Lviv in western Ukraine. But at the beginning of the summer we returned (to Kyiv) with our products and with the people there,” she told The Associated Press.
“It’s the same factory, one office, one team,” Litkovska says now, as it was before the war, and she “extended our team in the first year of the war because we ran out of orders.”
Last year, she organized activist fashion events with other Ukrainian designers, including pop-ups in Paris, Berlin, Munich and Milan, and raised about 50,000 euros ($53,000) to buy medicine, as well as support Kiev’s largest children’s hospital and the armed forces. She asked for 30% profit to go to Ukraine.
“It’s an amazing process,” she says, explaining how one of her initiatives involved selling Little Angels.
The fashion community is key to raising awareness and raising money for the war effort because it “has a huge following, millions and millions, and can attract their audience to what’s going on,” Litkovska said.
Undercover makes a comparison
Jun Takahashi, founder and designer of Japanese streetwear brand Undercover, once cited British designer Vivienne Westwood as an inspiration.
Westwood’s signature punk was in the air as Takahashi performed an exciting set with ambient flourishes and contrasts.
A shiny gray foam material became a parachute-like shawl. He wore Formula One-style wader boots and a black and white racing check motif on the cleats.
The high and low musings continued with a crisp bomber jacket made from posh tweed and kinky boots in bright violet. Addictions came with acid tones.
Gloves on one side, and a hand motif on the pants that looks like it suddenly wants to sneak up on the leg must be the gimmick of the year.
LAGERFELD book
Fashion experts gathered at the Musee d’Orsay to celebrate a new book about former Chanel front man Karl Lagerfeld, whose death in 2019 at the age of 85 still casts a shadow over Paris Fashion Week.
To celebrate the global launch of “Paradise Now: The Amazing Life of Karl Lagerfeld,” author William Middleton spoke with magazine editor Elizabeth von Guttmann about the book’s origins.
Middleton’s writing and biography focused on the German-born couturier’s business acumen – beyond his design.
The man whose decades-long stewardship of Fendi and Chanel made him one of the most influential designers of the late 20th century discussed the man’s enduring legacy.
