The 18th century is having a moment—on the runway and in real life. In Paris, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs just opened “A Day in the 18th Century: Chronicle of a Parisian Townhouse.” Next week, Palais Galliera will follow with “Fashion in the 18th century: A Fantasized Legacy.”
That title applies just as handily to Harris Reed’s fall outing for Nina Ricci, whose elevator pitch would be “Marie Antoinette goes to Glastonbury”—which inevitably finds her wearing Wellies and her petticoats muddied and powdered wig strewn with leaves. “We quite literally took these regal 18th-century silhouettes and then grounded them in a bit of reality,” said Reed backstage before the show. “It’s an exercise in joy and what I love about fashion, which is really to push the imagination and find this weird parallel where they are kind of united as one.”
Reed described how a craving for femininity made him want to give it more space in a male-dominated world, starting with the pannier. He gleefully toyed with construction, bringing inner caging to the surface and riffing on archival sketches by Ricci’s longtime creative director, Gérard Pipart, for a production of the ballet Cinderella, staged at the Kremlin theater in the ’90s.
With this collectsion, Reed also drew broadly from across the Ricci canon, recasting signatures like cheetah print in maximalist iterations and plucking a jacket—here in a rose motif etched with blue faux fur—from a ’90s collectsion. From the ’50s came a double-collar jacket, now with a riding detail; for anyone familiar with the bouquinistes along the Seine, a black hourglass cocktail dress will instantly call to mind period advertising for the house that sealed its fortune with the perfume L’Air du Temps in 1948. Of an electric jacquard with fur trim, the designer allowed that he wanted to amp up “the performative spirit in the clothes.”
Beneath the romp through French history and house archives, that seemed to be the true aim of this collectsion: Here were clothes as costume, a tongue-in-cheek celebration constructed for queens of the digital realm. “Everyone is almost kind of getting dressed up for one big party, but they feel like they’re part of that theme,” said Reed. Now that the runway party is over, what will be interesting to see is how the crinolines, lace bloomers, corsetry, sashes, and attendant hoopla actually rock up on the shop floor—and in real life.
