IMBALANCE BY SARAH BURTON

During the Spring/Summer shows in Paris, it seemed that some designers had given up the struggle against the fabric itself. Freed from all discipline, cloth gathered, spread and slipped along the body; at times a refuge, at times a form of surrender, it enveloped the silhouette like a cocoon in which one might seek, for a moment, to escape the tumult of the world. Sarah Burton, at Givenchy, chose the opposite path.

Where others embraced fluidity, she answered with line; disorder with cut; the uncertainty of form with the precision of proportion. Her collection seemed conceived as a kind of toolbox for the modern woman: little artifice, but rather that quiet rigour which gives a garment its strength.

In search of this clarity, Burton turned back to the origins. She revisited Hubert de Givenchy’s earliest collections, their black tailoring, their animal prints, and that dark elegance she considers almost Hitchcockian. But the past, when truly understood, should not simply be reproduced: it must be transformed. Thus, the narrow skirts of another era, whose elegance once came at the cost of a certain captivity of the body, give way to technical knits. The line remains sharp, but the woman regains her freedom.

Then come sweeping coats, dresses almost sculpted into space, and leather bodysuits borrowing something of the toughness of motorcycle wear. Skirts rise at the front and fall longer at the sides; striped suits cross over the body while their sleeves wrap around the torso. Everything appears constructed, and yet everything seems on the verge of losing its balance. Perhaps therein lies the true subject of this collection.

For in a world that seems itself to have lost its centre of gravity, how does one still find balance in couture? Sarah Burton does not seek the answer in vagueness. She does not conceal disorder beneath metres of fabric; she confronts it with rigour — a rigour pursued so far that it, too, becomes almost excessive.

Admittedly, it is difficult to imagine these great deconstructed coats, with their triangular shoulders, making their way each morning through the boardrooms of La Défense. But what does it matter? Fashion is perhaps not always meant to submit obediently to life as it is. It can also reveal its contradictions.

And that is precisely why I loved this collection: because, in the midst of an age searching for its footing, Sarah Burton has created something more unsettling than perfect harmony.

FM