“The idea was like, if you were in a simulation, or we all found out we were in a simulation, would you live differently? Would it change what you did? If the world around you went up and you realized we were in a matrix, what would you do tomorrow?”
This was Colm Dillane’s elevator pitch for the fourth wall busting fashion show in a movie in a fashion show that he presented on Rue Cambon tonight. It began as the lights came up on four screens that created a large box on the runway in front of us. A Dillane-directed film showed Vincent Cassel wandering the streets of Paris looking as tense and drawn as his printed shearling looked warm. He took shelter in a café, momentarily relaxed over an unbranded coffee. But then a sharply-coiffed woman who’d caught his attention was briefly obscured by a passing waitress before… somehow being wiped altogether from the room. His coffee started to shake in its cup. Cassel, eyes already bulging, lost it. Suddenly the entire room wiped: he was alone in a white void.
The screens flickered out before being winched up into the eaves to reveal a real-life chair and table set up. A model dressed in the same outfit as Cassel strode agitatedly out of it towards the photographers, shouting: “Who are you? Is this real?” Sorry sir, but this was simply a standard Saturday evening at Paris menswear. Adding a meta twist, Cassel himself was sitting in the audience across the runway, smiling broadly.
Dillane’s collection came out on a cast including many older than usual models who, you slowly surmised, were part of a broader direction to echo the vibe of some of cinema’s greatest alternative future flick protagonists. I was especially taken with Richard Biedul’s look 3 portrayal of Clive Owen in Children of Men, complete with coffee cup, haunted eyes, battered trench, and shirt and tie. There was a fair bit of Neo and Morpheus black leather, plus a textured burgundy leather alternative with fireman’s clasp fastenings running up each leg. There were several Tyler Durden looks.
It was bold marketing to include a collaborative capsule with Jameson whisky in a show with so many twitchy and troubled middle-aged protagonists. There was also a glimpse at some turf-soled Havaiana flip flops that looked to relate to a World Cup tie-up to come. There were many pieces with Dillane’s illustrations and paintings woven into or printed upon the surface.
When Cassel’s model avatar returned, the cast sat at the café tables on the runway as the screens lowered around them. The film flashed up again to show Cassel’s return to “normality.” Freed by his knowledge he started to dance. Said Dillane: “My thesis is, even if we were living in a glitch, you try to live like a Kidsuper character. I wouldn’t change the way I live. I would be doing this.”
