PARIS: Paris Fashion Week went underground in more ways than one when a rising young avant-garde designer held her show on the city’s Metro.
Berlin-based Andra Dumitrascu had to think quickly when the venue for her show late Friday fell through at the last minute.
So she directed fashionistas to the nearest Metro station, Rambuteau, where her models used the platform as a runway.
“I didn’t like the idea of doing it in the street, I thought a Metro station might be a better place,” the Romanian-born designer told AFP.
“I love the adrenaline and the instability of the situation,” she added.
But the organizers had their work cut out to clear a passage, with the models sometimes being swallowed up by passengers getting on and off the trains.
While Dumitrascu did not have official permission for the show, she said “it was worth taking the risk” — and fashion critics and passengers alike seemed to enjoy the spectacle.
This is not the first time the designer has gone off-piste — her last show took place in a sex hotel.
This collection, called “Kebaby,” had a youthful rave vibe with clothes mixing sportswear with Islamic influences.
Earlier in the day the Japanese brand Issey Miyake used dancers to kick off a remarkable collection drawn from the landscape of Iceland, with dresses and capes summoning up ice floes and ice cubes that you could see Bjork drooling over.
Tokyo master Yohji Yamamoto’s spring-summer collection on Friday night was almost entirely in black with flashes of vampire red in the lining of his trailing capes and scarves, with one model wearing one of his labels on her skin.
Another Japanese institution, Junya Watanabe, wowed critics in the first of the Saturday shows with his bravura punky hook-up with the Finnish textile house Marimekko.
“Now that’s a collaboration,” The New York Times’s Vanessa Friedman tweeted of his startling sculptural black and white creations.
Haider Ackermann, who also designs for Berluti, brought that razor-edged tailoring into play for his own brand, with shimmering red and gold lame tuxedos and tightly wrapped strap tops in collection that oozed power.