Judith Watt
THE Grande Arche de la Defense is not a practical venue for a fashion show, but anything is possible during the Paris shows — and last Friday Belgian designer Dirk Bikkembergs presented his 1997 menswear collection there.
As about 20 briefly clad male models marched on like automata, the final boot was given to the goddess- worshipping drag-queen hype of the early Nineties that placed a wholly different sartorial subculture on the catwalk.
That masculinity is again dominating male style is apparent when looking at the return of the suit to the international menswear collections: the Savile Row suit is the hallmark of Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label; Gucci’s Tom Ford cites Lawrence Harvey and Dirk Bogarde as his inspiration; and Calvin Klein has introduced the “natural tapered” suit, with slim trousers.
Beefcake with rippling muscles and bounding with health has replaced the cross-dressed diva in a move that’s at once camp and traditional. When designing his fully canvassed suits, Klein said he wanted to “give the impression that the man has the body of a swimmer”. Who said men’s fashion wasn’t artifice?