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It was a fall season of hard-edged tailoring and soft ruffles, armor-like details and feminine lace, extreme craft and sleek futurism. It was a fall season that was all over the place.
But at Lanvin, Alber Elbaz pulled it all together into one beautiful package, tied up with yards and yards of grosgrain ribbon. He gave us the power woman we had been waiting for through a month of shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris. These weren't the samurai warrior princesses of Nicolas Ghesquiere's science fiction imagination at Balenciaga, or the scary fembots of Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent. They weren't Olivier Theyskens' woodland nymphs at Nina Ricci or the spandex-clad super athletes Miuccia Prada introduced at Miu Miu.
These were Everywoman, real-life femme fatales emerging from the fog ready to take on the world in the boardroom, the bedroom, on the red carpet and in the carpool lane. Elbaz doesn't make fantasy collections. His clothes are not so tied to a trend or season that you won't want to look at them after four months, and they aren't designed for 17-year-old bodies. Which in this economy means they make sense.
This was minimalism Lanvin-style, a nearly all-black, seasonless collection that was about romance and painstaking technique more than rigid tailoring, covered up yet easily dressed up with Gobstopper-sized crystal necklaces and bracelets.
Grosgrain ribbon has become a Lanvin signature. After all, it was those ribbon-wrapped pearls and ribbon-strung pendants that helped put the house back in the fashion spotlight, sparking interest in the costume jewelry business among other designers who have made statement necklaces a trend for fall.
This time, ribbon was at the heart of the collection, with sewn-together strips of grosgrain and chiffon wrapping the body to create softly draped shirts, short skirts gathered into a single frill at the hip, and...