For Fall/Winter 2021, Lanvin’s creative director Bruno Sialelli looked backward and forwards with elegance and optimism through a playful and luxurious video paying homage to the MTV music years of the early 2000s.
Some people are ready to party like it’s 1999. Or perhaps more accurately 2004, the year “Rich Girl”, the Gwen Stefani anthem that Lanvin’s Bruno Sialelli has been obsessed with since his teens and which is the season’s soundtrack, was released.
Sialelli’s creative team brought the collection’s short film and accompanying lookbook to life at the Shangri La Hotel in Paris – an opulent palace that once belonged to a descendant of Napoléon Bonaparte. Models partied in a lavish suite and treated the luxury establishment’s hallways like a runway. British rapper Eve, who was in the original music video, made a cameo appearance.
The mood was positive, upbeat and dressed-up. Evening for everyday. Fabrics were lustrous, tactile and sensuous: duchesse satin, taffeta, silk charmeuse, silk crepe, the glamour or animal-print faux fur. Dresses and coats flew around the body, backs gently caped, lending ceremony to every gesture – a mood of couture from the oldest Parisian maison.
In constant conversation with Jeanne Lanvin, elements are drawn from the house’s archives – but abstracted, idealised. The ‘’Jewelry’’ dress – Jeanne Lanvin’s streamlining of evening gown and bijou into one entity – was reimagined in brief cocktail dresses, engineered to emphasise dynamic movement. Others were wound from grosgrain ribbon, embroidered with a constellation of stars (drawn from a 1924 example) or knotted from satin like a bow, a gift of femininity to women. The idea of cosmetics or perfume – a soft ‘’sugar cloud’’ of pastel color – was evoked through drifts of ostrich feathers, and punctuated with shades of powder pink, baby blue and a strong, lipstick red. In gold, the Lanvin logo was worn as a badge of honour, studding bags, forming heels. It famously depicts Jeanne Lanvin and her daughter Marguerite – jewelry was shaped as the flower that shares her name.
Lanvin collaborated with the James Rosenquist Foundation to feature the American pop artist’s work in a series of prints. Finding a counterpart in the Lanvin men’s Fall/Winter 2021 collection, the chosen artworks for women were Gears (1977), Welcome to the Water Planet (1989), Time Door Time D’Or (1989) and Through A Glass Ceiling (2004). They depicted the typically feminine – flowers, lipsticks, pearls – everyday objects transformed into modern-day iconography.
