Seeing certain silhouettes recently emerging from Kim Jones’s ateliers, a question hangs in the air like an overly cold fragrance: does couture still breathe? Draped in a deliberately bloodless aesthetic, these elongated figures with yellowed hair seem less to walk than to float, deprived of weight, of sex, at times even of humanity.

The reference to a “Vincenzo-style” couture, artisanal in appearance and expressionist in intent, could have promised a radical gesture. But here, radicality borders on the disembodied. The body is no longer the support of the garment; it becomes a pretext. A barely inhabited line, a gaunt abstraction upon which everything slides without ever taking root.

This obsession with neutrality, pushed to the point of erasure, raises questions. In attempting to erase gender, one erases the living. In stylising fragility, one ends up dangerously aestheticising it. Couture, once a place of construction, of structure, almost of bodily architecture, is reduced to an exercise in controlled disappearance.

Kim Jones is an intelligent, cultivated designer, fully aware of the history he manipulates. That is precisely why this stance is troubling. Provocation is nothing new, but it becomes hollow when repeated without counterpoint. Couture does not need to be pleasant, certainly, but it does need to be inhabited.

In striving too hard to turn the body into an idea, one forgets that it is first and foremost a presence. And without presence, even the most conceptual couture ultimately resembles a well-dressed ghost. Of course, you’ve guessed it: the one truly following this path isn’t Kim, but Anderson. Funny, isn’t it?