Lanvin S/S 2020 Paris Fashion Week Women's

Mood board: Jeanne Lanvin began her career in the early 1900s first as a milliner, then as a childrenswear designer, creating clothes for her daughter Marguerite, which were soon coveted by other wealthy parents. There was a young naiveté behind Bruno Sialelli’s sophomore collection for the Parisian maison, which was based on the time and dimension-spanning comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, that ran in the New York Herald from 1905-11. It detailed a young boy’s dream adventures, which Sialelli found paralleled not just his own childhood in the South of France, but his own fantastical interpretation of Lanvin. For S/S 2020, the designer took a deep dive into different eras and genres, in a collection brimming with comic strip and bold checkerboard prints, cocooned or draped couture silhouettes and utilitarian outerwear, nodding to the clothing sported by Capote’s ‘Swans’, ancient Egyptian embellishments and archival 60s prints. 

Scene setting: Last season, Sialleli held his show at the The Musée de Cluny, which houses one of the largest collections of medieval art in the world. For spring, he showed in the Gilles Clément-designed gardens of the Quai Branly Museum. In a bid to take guests into a closed panel of their own comic strip world, Sialleli presented his show in silence, with guests tuning into a set of headphones, with excerpts from Lord of the Flies and King and the Mockingbird. Fashion has the power to confront socio-political issues (see Dior’s forest-lined show set or Marni’s upcycled jungle, both a nod our environmentally fraught era) or offer an escapist antidote (like Richard Quinn’s imagined bygone world). Even in the pouring rain, this show had the power of dreamlike transportation.

Finishing touches: There were a plethora of covetable accessories on display here, like leather shoulder bags pieced together with oversize running stitch, Sou'wester hats with floral earrings formed from graphic leather petals and camera bags in bold polka dot and stripe prints.