I found myself there, amid that gathering of eyes devoid of sparkle, when the creations of the young man known as Davis passed before us. And I confess that something within me, something I had believed forever buried beneath the melancholies of Combourg, stirred once more.

There was in these silhouettes a grace that I could describe only as poetic: color blocking rose like a well-measured stanza; the prints whispered a new language that Cézanne might perhaps have understood; and the constructions seemed to draw as much from the architecture of cathedrals as from the art of Man Ray, that singular genius who painted what he could not photograph.

The color palette spoke with the restraint of profound things, and the silhouettes, fluid in their cuts, possessed that elegance of great waters flowing effortlessly and without sound. It was then that Oscar, seated to my right, remarked with the sphinx-like smile so characteristic of him:

“Fashion is the only art in which a woman is at once the painter and the canvas, and Davis has understood that she can also be the poem.”

I did not entirely agree, for the two Charleston dresses, with their gold lamé and metallic satin applied to those low-slung hips, struck me as more dazzling than luminous, akin to Bengal lights admired for a fleeting moment before they fade into the night.

“You confuse brilliance with beauty,” I replied.

He shrugged with evident delight.

“And you confuse nostalgia with judgment. But let us at least agree that the House of Ferragamo recovers here something of a soul.”

To that, I could only assent in silence.

FM