by Timothy Hagy
PARIS, July 1, 2005 - Even as the hotel clerk took cash from my outstretched
hand, his inherent Gallic hauteur got the best of him. After having
criticized most everything American, he suggested that the French socialist
system should be a model for the world. With staggering unemployment, bone
numbing taxes, a dysfunctional educational system and a paralyzed government,
it takes a stretch of the imagination to find that model convincing.
But fashion is full of imagination, and the threads there, at least as Paris
men’s shows are concerned, are holding firm. On a cloudy Friday, when the
skies spit drops of rain, the season effectively opened with the Antonio Miro
show staged in an art gallery located steps away from the Bastille.
Through good times and bad, the Barcelona-based designer has shown each
season, and as the boys (the in-house term used for male models) streamed in
from Milan, followed by the fashion set and their clouds of perpetual smoke -
the source being both cigarette and otherwise - the lights came up on the
Summer 2006 collections.
Miro’s casual look was seemingly aimed at a sizzling-hot day. With a palette
jazzed up with pumpkin and robin egg blue, shirts were sprinkled with polka
dots, while aluminum lamé pants and even a plum evening jacket sparkled along
the catwalk.
If you were looking for ideas that pushed the codes of men’s fashion a belt
notch further, you probably didn’t find them. But from a commercial points of
view, all was well.
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