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Sep 25, 2012
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Young designers kick off Paris Fashion Week

By
AFP
Published
Sep 25, 2012

A hidden walkway, high up behind the clock of the Gare de l'Est station, was the unlikely setting for the first show of Paris Fashion Week, as Impasse de la Defense kicked off the nine-day rollercoaster.


A model presents a creation by Impasse de la Defense during the Spring/Summer 2013 ready-to-wear collection show on September 25, 2012 in Paris.

A black-clad rocker puffed into a plaintive harmonica as the Parisian label's founder Karim Bonnet sent out his models wrapped in floor-length capes whose motifs picked up on the columns and steel beams of the neo-classical station.

The models wore black and white paper crowns made from a collage of images from the American 1950s, bright heels peeping out from under their capes.

Beneath the stoles, which they dropped to the floor at one end of the runway, they wore sheer layered tulle skirts under velvety nipped-waist jackets.

Tie-dyed and splash-printed dresses, in soft orange, pink or mauve, paired bare shoulders with waxy, flared skirts cut on the calf or ankle.

One bare-backed dress was a patchwork of half a dozen bright checks and tartans -- like an oddly attractive collage of tablecloths.

The designer said he drew inspiration from the contemporary art scene for his spring-summer 2013 collection, in creating "simple fashion" for a woman with a strong identity, and the brains to match.

The first day of the Paris ready-to wear shows is traditionally devoted to young designers, with the first big names hitting the runways on Wednesday, from Dries Van Noten to Rochas.

Later Tuesday the Paris-based South Korean Moon Young Hee sent out a delicate look built on contrasts of masculine and feminine, opaque and sheer, structured and draped fabrics.

A charcoal grey suit in wide pin-stripe opened the show, asymmetric jacket above a boxy wide skirt slashed high up the back.

Followed a succession of dresses and tunics in linen and organza, most with arms bare, demure necklines and skirts at mid calf, modelled above flat black patent lace-ups to an ethereal soundtrack of piano, flute and strings.

The designer, whose register is often ultra-feminine, said she wanted this time to inject masculine elements, with more structured cuts and fabrics, to see how they played against her drapes and transparencies.

Like on one of the shorter looks, which paired black bermuda pants with a black tunic in panels of mat and glossy silk.

She broke up a palette dominated by white, black and cream with geometric panels of rust, tan or blue, like on the skirts of a cream dress whose outsized chimney collar billowed softly around the neck.

Alice Lemoine -- whose Parisian label "Le Moine Tricote" means literally "The Monk Knits" -- practices what she calls "instinctive knitting", creating mesh modules which she then drapes and assembles on the body.

The result, her second collection shown as part of the official Paris calendar, included a short sleeveless dress of airy, black and gold knit, or a white tunic falling like an apron over a sheer knee-length petticoat.

And in a nod to Lemoine's artistic family roots, several of the models were laid flat and pinned like artworks on the walls, like knitted still lives.PARIS, Sept 25, 2012 (AFP)

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