Paris Fashion Week: At Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu, Paris Fashion Week boogies out
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The spring-summer 2011 runway season ended in Paris on Wednesday with the same color and optimism that started nearly four weeks ago in New York.
Marc Jacobs’ Louis Vuitton show was Shanghai grand, perhaps because China is the luxury brand’s newest retail frontier.
In electric brights, the clothes walked the line beautifully between classy and campy, with silk mandarin-collar suits and slender heels swinging tassels, and evening gowns shimmying with a rainbow of beaded fringe.
The collection was a jewel box of cheongsam-style dresses in popsicle stripes or orchid prints, some worn with low slung sequined obi belts. There were tiger stripes in this year of the tiger too, abstracted into disco prints. China’s beloved giant panda even made an appearance, silhouetted on a sequin T-shirt.
Compared with the glitz of the clothes, the bags were understated. Long clutches and compact flap bags came color-blocked or covered in the all-important (to new luxury markets at least) LV logos.
Louis Vuitton spring-summer 2011 runway collection photo gallery
The party continued at Miu Miu, where Miuccia Prada’s rock ‘n’ roll wannabes looked like they stepped off the bus in Hollywood and into a vintage store full of leather jackets by the famed 1960s-era East West Musical Instruments Co.
Flashing metallic flower and star cutouts, leather jackets were the headliners, paired with pleated school girl skirts or satin dresses, and neon sandal booties.
Miu Miu spring-summer 2011 runway collection photo gallery
Snippets of audition tapes played on the soundtrack while Rihanna sat front row. In the words of Joni Mitchell, Prada was ‘stoking the starmaker machinery of the popular song.’
-- Booth Moore in Paris
Photos, top and middle: Looks from the Louis Vuitton spring-summer 2011 runway collection shown during Paris Fashion Week. Photos, bottom: Looks from the Miu Miu spring-summer 2011 runway collection. Credit: Jonas Gustavsson & Peter Stigter / For The Times
