• You can always sense when there's a hit in the making at a catwalk show.
Something of a pack reaction takes place among the audience. No one speaks, but somehow an outfit is singled out, locked onto, and all eyes follow it until it leaves the room. It takes a lot, but sometimes even the most jaded sceptics will stop staring into the middle distance, shift their heads from one side to the other, and nearly smile.
Last week, that happened in the Valentino salon above the Place Vendôme in Paris, where the young Italian designer Alessandra Facchinetti was making her couture debut. It wasn't the showiest piece that did it, but a gunmetal-grey knee-length chiffon dress with long sleeves and a high neck. You couldn't exactly classify it as sober - what with all those exquisite sequins climbing over the shoulders and throat - but there was something about it that every woman in the room knew felt right. Mood-wise. Wanting-wise.
Modest attire: Valentino’s high-necked frock (top right) could almost have taken its inspiration from the range recently launched by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (left)
I put it to the back of my mind until I opened the paper and saw a report about the dress collection that the women of a polygamous Texan sect - the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - have put out (take a look at
www.fldsdress.com). And couldn't believe my eyes. There were the high necks, the long sleeves, the configuration of flat chest and puffed shoulder over which the fashion sorority had passed a silent benediction the night before.
Holy Moses. Here were the forces of anti-fashion seeing eye to eye with the high-fashion congregation. What was this? The first evidence of the arrival of restraint that we have all been anticipating since Gordon Brown entered Downing Street?
Well, I know it's a bit much to make a link between a £10,000-plus haute couture frock and the shaping up of an aesthetic of modesty, but it's worth a second look.
Checking again on the clothes that are heading this way for autumn (meaning, end of this month for designer stores), it looks to me as if there's more of the same on the way. One of the most rated collections, Givenchy, had high-necked, long-sleeved blouses inspired by Latin American Catholicism. Even Dolce & Gabbana - those hedonists of Italian fashion - have run to knee-to-neck concealing shapes with done-up flouncy necklines.
If it wasn't for the fact that you could almost see through the loosely belted tartan chiffon frocks in their D&G collection, you could imagine them being approved by those peculiar church elders out there in Texas.
Moreover, there's going to be a lot of the heavy stuff around this autumn: dour tweed, grey flannel and whatnot. It's all pointing in the same direction.
A quasi-penitential, sober mood is working its way through in response to the times. No surprise, really, I suppose. After the excesses of the past few years, a purge is due.
Exactly the same thing happened in fashion in the recession of the early Nineties, and even a sector as apparently high-flown and detached from reality as haute couture can't help registering it.
telegraph.co.uk
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