Star designers display menswear
By Katherine Weisman, Globe Correspondent, 7/2/2003
PARIS - The spring-summer 2004 menswear collections effectively closed Monday night with two powerhouse designers - Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and Hedi Slimane for Christian Dior - vying for attention with back-to-back shows.
The Dior show was literally the season's biggest, hosting a crowd of 1,200 - fashion pros and celebrities, among others. And the house pulled out all the stops for a fashion display that resembled a rock concert. Lighting director Thierry Dreyfus set the theme with a red laser show, and the models walked onto the runway in front of a wall of motorized mirrors that moved on cue to changes in the electronic music from the French band DSL.
So what about the clothes? The lean and mean silhouette was clear, but details got lost in the whole production.
There were long, skinny pants that scrunched up the ankle, with white shoes. Small jackets were key - mainly variations on the classic spencer, a spokeswoman said. There were tops made of strands of black beads that crisscrossed the torso.
The look recalled that of European punk rockers, the Ramones, or Keith Richards, even though a spokeswoman said Slimane was not referencing to anything in particular. Jackets were reworked with embroidery or appliqued strands of fabric; the fabrics, mainly black, often had a bit of sheen resembling leather from surface treatments...
