As couture shows try to shake off their pandemic-induced torpor, Stéphane Rolland was glad to be back. Still, there were things that he hoped would not come back.
“I’m fed up with too much eccentricity, vulgarity, tacky attitudes. I have such love and respect for women that I feel I’m a guardian,” he said backstage before the show, describing the woman he wanted to portray as “free, beautiful, sensual without being aggressive.”
He opened the show with an homage to Manfred Thierry Mugler, who died Sunday at the age of 73, saying that “every one of us kept an emotion” from the late couturier.
And it was this idea that carried through a collection of mostly monochromatic outfits, with few adornments save for oversize crystals and glass pebbles, executed by French glassmaker Théophile Caillethat.
Referencing the abstract, fan-like paintings of emerging Italian Spanish painter Viani through his filmy creations with sleeves sweeping the floor, acres of chiffon and satin crepe wafting graphically behind them, the couturier sought to describe “a free gesture” to achieve a “more natural, more fluid, more organic image.”
When fabrics became more substantial, the silhouettes had a commanding presence, especially when he carved out the back of a dress or finished a sweater with an opulent cowl. Dressed in a black ballgown, Rolland’s muse Nieves Álvarez played up to this idea by facing off with another model, in a no-less-striking white gown. The veteran Spanish model continued down the runway with a victorious moue — the kind of gesture, and spirit, the French couturier was going for.