There’s no better feeling than walking through a crowd of paparazzi. The Isabel Marant show, held at the Palais de Tokyo, was a star-studded event. The room was overpacked with benches and fell almost into darkness, with flashes of light periodically exposing the A-list frowers as they jostled around the sweltering set.
I brushed past Renée Rapp, the singer who unusually rose to acclaim from her role as Regina George in Mean Girls the Musical. She was perched atop classic Isabel Marant wedge sneakers and drowned in a fur gilet. I had to hold back the musical theatre child in me not to blurt out, “Your opt-up at the end of ‘World Burn’ changed my life.” I am not that gauche, I am not that gauche, I repeated to myself in my head.
Unveiled was an impressive collection of 65 looks. It leaned commercially and relied on 2010s tropes: a red leather jacket, scuffed jeans and zebra-print shoes. There were moments of clarity, however. It was an encapsulation of New York’s early 21st-century club-scene it-girl. Though placid in its aesthetic ambition, the collection oozed with sex appeal and dragged the ‘model-off-duty’ Isabel Marant woman from the brand’s peak 2010s period firmly into the now. An ultramarine blue leather dress was punctured with holes to mimic lace, cinched with a fat black belt à la Gok Wan. Black heels were tipped in red like a bird’s beak. A sailor cable-knit cardigan was tied down its front like a corset.
Coats were slung over shoulders and hair ruffled with salt spray, extending the current imposing indie sleaze revival. It was the first time I saw supermodels walk a runway. Alex Consani is a star. Her walk pounds the runway and elevates anything she wears into luxury unattainability. Everyone wants to be her, wants to want her, wants to eat her.
The set was entombed by two towers of stage lights, blasting strobes over the runway as club music poured from speakers. Isabel Marant cast a spell of nostalgia over its audience. The 14-year-old me, desperate to be partying in NYC with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, came climbing out of the hole I buried him in. Remember when getting a DUI was hot? Yeah, so does Isabel Marant. The show proved the New York it-girl is undying, but the real it-girl here was, and will be for the foreseeable future, the incomparable Miss Consani.
