The Église Protestante Unie de l’Étoile is a liberal church, but Sunday Mass was not. The Vicara faithful turned out great tonight for designers Bryn Taubensee and Patric DiCaprio. The duo attracts the fashion-crazy crowd. No hat is too big and no bra is too revealing to wear alone. Taubensee and DiCaprio are self-obsessed, spinners of what they call fashion fan fiction. A fall 2018 show in which he paid tribute to his icons—Vivienne Westwood, Miguel Adrover, and André Walker—came to mind. They haven’t spelled it out so succinctly this season, but those in the room who were born in the 20th century can see the references.
Gucci came to mind as the show began. After the bride made her grand entrance, the first model wore a low-cut thong, her pubic hair framed in a fluorescent green heart — or was it Merkin? In any case, it could have been a callback to a Tom Ford-era Gucci ad. If you’ve ever seen it, you’ll know. Rudy Grinreich and his once-infamous 1964 monokini came up for re-examination next. It is still infamous more than 60 years later.
Elsewhere there were off-hand nods to the 1965 Yves Saint Laurent haute couture cocoon dress and Nicolas Ghesquière’s fall 2006 collection for Balenciaga in which he reinterpreted Cristóbal’s grandiose experiments. An inverted triangle top with a bow tie should have been inspired by Klaus Naomi. The otherworldly actor wore white face makeup, but it could just as easily have been William Klein’s iconic 1966 film. Polymago? who provided the source material for the face-painted models here.
Much of the show was skin-baring in one way or another: hip-cut trousers with Trump Lowell thongs, leather dresses and skirts that zipped open around the curves of the hips or breasts, harlequins of exposed flanks on glittering duchess dresses. “The collection confronts the tension between perfection and chaos,” wrote Taubensee and DiCaprio. “His entire cast of characters suggests that the most appealing clothes for your future are the ones that mirror our broken past.” And of course our past. The most shockingly original ideas retain their relevance.
