Balenciaga SS08: First Look

For TI the Paris booking sweepstakes came down to one crucial moment. The first exit at the Balenciaga SS08. The honor, as is visible, went to one Kasia Struss at Women, the nicest Polish nineteen year old you could ever hope to meet. Given all the girls who came out after her, I think that was a little bit genius of Monsieur. Give that girl another season of model currency! The clothes,as was the case at Prada, served as a kind of summary of the the last three collections. Coloration that reminded you of SS 07, shapes seen at the FW 06 and the global pattern recognition strategy from FW 07. Its all I kept thinking in my blissfully jet-lagged state..."pattern recognition system" at the mad chintzs and super-70's fabric treatments that poured out. Stylists will be mixing the Prada and Balenciaga pieces with maximum ease thise season. Look, after that rapid rush of ideas over the last two years, the guy is allowed to provide a summary collection. And god bless him for that 7am call time
Muchas Gracias to that certain bearded model manager who seems to have a Svengali like grip on his gaggle of girls. TI never goes backstage to anything (unless getting paid Linda level G's to do it) but our man-in-town tricked us into venturing on to the Anne Demeulemeester by waving that fail-safe in the air. Food. We drove somewhere deep in the really real side streets of the Left Bank littered with these really wonderfully dressed students flitting back and forth . That is when they were not purposefully rifling through piles of used DVD's and I found myself missing a time when I could do idle things like this. Madame Demeulemeester's rustic backstage was log-jammed with blue chip babes like Trentini and Stegner (who is nowhere as near to finished as the haters keep hissing into my mobile) mingled with the new school cool like Siri, Iekeliene , Alison Nix and Rachel Clark . There were lots of boy models there too but God help me if I had any sense of who they were. "But why are all the boys on one side of the room and all the girls on the opposite. Is this going to be a high school dance? " I asked one very American mannequin. " Why are you not interested?" "Cuz they're all lame.," she answered. They all looked very interesting to me , both the girls and boys with the jagged streaks of make-up that ran from their eyebrows to their nose and its amazing that its been 22 years of this rough and real aesthetic authored by Demeulemeester. I have such on a crush of AD. I think she personally, is a gorgeous woman. She represents the fantasy of a certain kind of spirit in a woman: ageless, creative, uncompromising but all in a very seductive and nurturing way. She is the aesthetic of her loose and layered clothes in her motorcyle boots and her long swath of undyed hair and it was nice to be reminded that everybody does not need to be au courant. It was very sweet to watch the way she lavished attention on the girls (An obviously exhausted Anabela was being embraced by AD as we we popped back out preshow...for food.).
The intenarary continued on, this time to the offices of Women Paris,on Rue de Madelaine where as we walked in Paul Rowland, fresh off the 10.55pm from JFK was spewing Polaroids from every which angle on girls and agents flitting in and out. If only there were NY agencies with this celebratory an energy. Huge bouquets of calla lillies seemed to be exploding everywhere you looked. An impeccably dressed young waiter was waltzing around the room with trays of really good white wine. Carolina P, who just hours ago graced the Balenciga runway was there as was our favorite new renegade MDC Top 10 Newcomer Lera. Elmer Olson was there in tete a tete with Paul, while a young scout from Romania was hyping his next generation. Paris ringmaster Bruno Jamange sat chuckling at it all and all considered (Lovisa, Toni, Kasia, Meghan Collison) I guess there was a lot to celebrate. We went downstairs for some...food! Suzanne Diaz newly coveted( post- Prada catwalk ) tottered into the fray wearing these sick sick shoes that got glares (of envy? approval? disapproval?) from this very parisienne diva sitting next to us. I love Ms Diaz because her intelligence is not for show but so sincere and so assured. It must be a Ross School thing. We ran over to Colette in the drizzle to look for tinted glasses with really thick frames, this season's limited edition kicks and a cropped black leather jacket that all the cool boys in Paris always seem to be rocking. It was too late when we got there and the store was closed, so we try again tommorow. All roads (as always) then ended at model central, Cafe Ruc, where my radar ears picked up the best piece of gossip gathered all day. This beat the Prada backstage war stories. Legend has it that there's a Rick Owens store set to open featuring a "humongous" statue Of Rick relieving himself in the form of a water fountain ...onto himself. Now there's ...how do you say... piss elegance... but this is entirely beyond. How I hope this is an urban myth. But let me pretend to be blase, jaded and unflappable in my lacquered decadence and run off to buy my little black cropped leather jacket from Rick now that he's marketing "outre". Its that kind of town no?