The Église Protestante Unie de l’Étoile is a liberal church, but Sunday mass this was not. The Vaquera faithful turned out in their finest for designers Bryn Taubensee and Patric DiCaprio tonight. This duo attracts a fashion-mad crowd; no hat is too big and no bra is too skin-baring to wear solo. Taubensee and DiCaprio are obsessives themselves, spinners of what they call fashion fan fiction. A fall 2018 show in which they paid tribute to their icons—Vivienne Westwood, Miguel Adrover, and André Walker—came to mind. They didn’t spell it out quite so succinctly this season, but people in the room born in the 20th century could clock the references.
Gucci came to mind almost as soon as the show began. After the bride made her grand entrance, the first model wore a low-cut thong, her pubic hair manicured into a fluorescent green heart—or was that a merkin? In any case, it could’ve been a callback to a Tom Ford-era Gucci ad; if you ever saw it, you’ll know the one. Rudi Gernreich and his once scandalous monokini of 1964 came up for reexamination next. It’s still scandalous more than 60 years later.
Elsewhere there were offhand nods to a 1965 Yves Saint Laurent haute couture cocoon dress and a fall 2006 Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière collection in which he was reinterpreting the great Cristóbal’s experiments in shape. An inverted triangle top affixed with a bow tie had to have been inspired by Klaus Nomi. The otherworldly performer wore white face makeup, but it could’ve just as easily been William Klein’s iconic 1966 film Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? that provided the source material for the models with the facepaint here.
Much of the rest of the show was skin-baring in one way or another: hip-cut trousers with trompe l’oeil thongs, leather dresses and skirts with zippers slinking open around the curve of a hip or a breast, harlequins of exposed flanks on shiny duchesse dresses. “The collection confronts the tension between perfection and chaos,” wrote Taubensee and DiCaprio. “Its cast of characters all seem to suggest that the most covetable clothes for your future are those that mirror our fractured present.” And, of course, our past. The most startlingly original ideas retain their relevance.
