Mme Woo and Katie Chung at Paris fashion week is always pleasure as you know it is going to be good, elegant, and probably chic, and that you are going to see a picture perfect show well organized to the tees. And so it proved. Classic Paris fashion venue the old post office above one of the railway cliffs off of the Gare St Lazare called the Cafeteria (old postal workers cafeteria) this show was as good as any during Paris FW SS17.
But there was a twist…
As the best models are in high demand during these shows the better shows all use the same models. Some even get flown in from abroad. But many are local. And some arrive late because the Paris FW schedule is jam packed and crammed with the latest designers trying to get a foot on the floor in the world’s capital of fashion. So what do you do when your show starts late (which happens most of the time as seating people is always difficult) and you are a model and your next show just start half an hour later? Do you get a taxi? No, because Parisian traffic is horrendously unreliable as is public transport. Ah, you get it, because indeed you call a bike messenger – a transporter – a Jason Statham type of guy not in a car, but on a motorbike fit for an action movie; so that you can shashay through traffic from location A to B in less than 10 minutes anywhere in Paris.
Thus the best moment of the show was four teenage male models arriving late for the show being transported by action type motorbike runners parking their hardware in front of the entrance of the industrial loft on the middle of the street, all four men, and all four boys – hair waiving in the wind – taking off their helmets at the same time, bike engines still running. It’s that moment when you wish your photographer was still outside and not already inside waiting for the show.
As for the show itself it was as beautiful as expected even though the gender fluidity – quite visible in pant-skirts and handbags and loose cuffs, cuts, and folds – is usually not a trademark in the Wooyoungmi shows. But here it was.
The press release states that Mme Woo and Katie Chung are trying to state the ‘delicacy’ in men, and that they were looking for ‘deconstruction of traditional masculinity’. But let’s call it sensuality, sensitivity, and sensibility – and why shouldn’t that be very male or masculine?
Of course this did not make the show anything less elegant or classy, but actually added somehow to the good traditional looks on display. So if anything the Wooyoungmi SS17 project may have failed and the designers have inadvertently added to masculinity in general by allowing men to wear skirt-pants and handbags.
In checkered and striped and waving lines and patterns no less. No doubt. Oversized coats. Flowing cuffs. Baggy pants with buttons and folds. Think pirates of the Caribbean. Think 17th century. For a real man is defined not so much by the looks of his handbag or his oversized flowing coat, but much more by what he carries inside or underneath. Just ask those transporters dropping off the modeling boys.
Posted by Sandro and photos from Wooyoungmi press.
