PARIS FASHION WEEK:WHAT MADE fashion news in Paris at the weekend wasn't the prevalence of lingerie as outerwear on the catwalks or references to the 1980s, but the opening of Uniqlo, the Japanese casual clothing brand in a huge store near the Opera.
Selling cashmere sweaters for €39 and trousers for €9.90 in all shapes and colours and a new collection by the German designer Jil Sander, hundreds lined up to get into the store in a buying frenzy that led to hour-long queues at the cash registers.
With annual sales of around €5.1 billion, 777 stores in Japan and 100 elsewhere, the company is bent on world domination. Its success has made its owner Tadashi Yanai the richest man in Japan.
It was Japanese designers in the l980s who took Paris by storm, with their avant garde ideas sending generations of women into wearing black.
On Saturday Rei Kawakubo, the visionary founder of Comme des Garcons, who famously said that she “always wanted to destroy symmetry”, presented her spring collection on models with candy floss hairdos and flat shoes.
An artful melange of materials and recomposed elements of tailoring, shapes were at odds with the body, fabrics at odds with the shapes.
Aping current fashion trends, shoulder pads were appliqued on frock coats or fashioned in leather like armour over a gentle white dress. An abstracted version of a trench coat appeared in flesh-coloured chiffon and biker shorts in polka-dot Lycra. As a conceptual statement it was defiantly idiosyncratic yet graceful in its own way.
Earlier her protege Junya Watanabe presented a collection of severely tailored narrow, shiny suits, more boyish than businesslike in spirit, with open-front jackets and cute tuck-and-seam detailing. White shirts, leggings and chequerboard print dresses added up to a desirable, wearable spring wardrobe for a stylish urbanite.
Making their Paris debut this week in a showroom are six young up-and-coming Japanese designers from the Vantan Design Institute supported by their school, which develops and promotes their work at home and abroad.
One, Aguri Sagimori (23), is already making a name for herself in Japan. “Most young Japanese designers feel they can’t challenge the masters like Yohji,” she told me, referring to Yohji Yamamoto, subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the VA in London and one of the original group from the 1980s. “But I’m not afraid,” she said with a smile.