At Balenciaga, the Incredible Disappearing Dress

The Balenciaga couture present opened with a meditation and ended with a storm cloud — one designed to vanish. That’s both an announcement of religion sooner or later or numerous sizzling air. Perhaps each.

Rather than the standard finale wedding ceremony robe, Demna, the model’s mononymous designer, supplied up 47 meters (155 ft) of the sort of black nylon usually used inside ball robes wound spherical and around the mannequin’s head and physique like mist, with neither seams nor fastenings.

“Thirty minutes earlier than the present, the costume didn’t exist,” Demna mentioned backstage. After the present, it wouldn’t both. When you find yourself speaking about couture, the place the hours of handwork that go into a chunk contribute to what’s usually an outrageous value, and the result’s meant to final eternally, that’s blasphemy of the best type.

It’s additionally the subsequent step in Demna’s quest to upend the hierarchy of worth — what’s treasured, what’s elegant, what’s price retaining (why you retain it) — and problem the luxurious establishment.

Earlier than the disappearing costume, for instance, there was a white night robe constituted of previous plastic luggage that had been melted to create a form of shiny dégradé impact, and one fabricated from gold foil, scrunched across the physique. Earlier than these there have been basic Balenciaga columns for society swans pieced collectively from strips of upcycled sweatshirts and soccer jerseys. And earlier than that there have been oversize live performance Tees and sweatshirts that had been truly hand-painted oils by the artist Abdelhak Benallou, that includes pictures of members of the Balenciaga atelier as a heavy steel band and lined — just like the denim jackets — in thick Italian scuba satin to protect their cocooning volumes.

Couture has at all times been about what’s on the within, and invention, however this was taking it to the intense: in silhouette and idea.

“No one actually wants couture, to be sincere,” Demna mentioned. “To me, it’s an expertise of garments” — the ordering within the atelier, the handwork, the key information — “and I needed to deliver it even additional to this concept.” As a substitute of Andy Warhol’s quarter-hour of fame, consider it as quarter-hour of vogue.

He was leaning into the idea that getting dressed is actually, as he put it, “a efficiency.” And within the case of the ephemeral look, one which received awfully near “The Emperor’s New Garments.” That doesn’t make it any much less entertaining or thought-provoking. Particularly amid collections the place efficiency of all kinds has been one thing of a pattern.

Performing Out

It was there at Iris van Herpen, the place the designer suspended her fashions in the midst of huge plaster-covered canvases that she then held on a wall subsequent to further artworks, turning the folks right into a dwelling collection of bas reliefs in organza, silk and lace and redefining the entire idea of wearable artwork.

There at Viktor&Rolf, the place Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, the harlequins of vogue, engaged of their standard sport of efficiency artwork, this time revisiting their 1998 present “Atomic Bomb” and reworking the human physique into a wide range of geometric compositions utilizing what seemed like very fancy nursery college constructing blocks. And it was the subtext of Giorgio Armani’s 89 variations on velvet and pearls at Armani Privé.

Properly, what else are you going to put on to the theater?

Perhaps one of many many Nineteen Fifties-inspired sheaths at Schiaparelli, the place Daniel Roseberry turned away from what he known as his “meme-weaver” strategy (bear in mind the robot baby in his spring present, or the life-size animal heads of an earlier assortment?), in addition to the crutch of his signature gilded physique elements, in favor of a concentrate on form and suggestion. Shoulders had been broad, skirts slim, the impact usually magnetic.

“The danger for me is there’s nothing right here that’s meant to interrupt the web,” Mr. Roseberry mentioned. (In reality, he forbade his staff’s members from their telephones once they designed the gathering.) The reward was extra intimate drama.

A pale pink silk corset costume supplied a play on Schiaparelli’s well-known stiletto hat of 1937 (it was a Salvador Dalí collaboration), this time with a shoe cupping every breast, the heel like a warning spike about getting too shut — besides you couldn’t actually inform what they had been till you bought shut. A pair of black tuxedo pants was topped with a befeathered white shirt, like Odette and Odile in a single outfit.

Dressing Down

Nonetheless, nobody addressed the topic of the function that garments play within the efficiency of self fairly as cleverly as Nicolas Di Felice, the creative director of Courrèges, in his visitor designer spot at Jean Paul Gaultier.

Reasonably than provide up his personal “better of” parade of Gaultierisms (cone bras and tattoo shirts and marinières) like among the visitor stars who got here earlier than, he mentioned in a preview that he as a substitute had determined to concentrate on the extra summary query of what he thought made Gaultier particular: That, in placing all kinds of our bodies and people on his runways, the designer had supplied a spot and a way to “be who you’re, and present who you’re, and reveal who you’re.”

In Mr. Di Felice’s case, that will be a really proficient designer.

On the bottom of a rectangle and a corset (itself considered one of Mr. Gaultier’s signature clothes; Madonna, anybody?), and with solely hook and eye closures for each becoming and ornament, he constructed a fastidiously calibrated treatise in material on how we use garments to disclose, or disguise, ourselves.

From the primary look, an all-enveloping coat that swallowed the top, he slowly peeled away the layers, stripping off a slice of fabric right here and changing it with lace; dropping the shoulders there, so the torso of a slip costume puddled across the waist to show the internal boning; undoing the hooks at a seam, to indicate a slice of pores and skin. The steel closures glinted like diamanté below the lights, the final sleight of hand in a magic present in (sure) quarter-hour and about not simply costume, however internal life. Presto, change-o.