PARIS – The audience at Paul Smith’s spring-summer 2012 menswear collection may have been sweltering, but the British designer’s models looked as cool as cucumbers.
Wearing slim, colorblock suits made from panels of slightly different shades of blue, with sleeveless vests layered over their blazers, their faces fresh and shine-free, the models seemed to embody both definitions of the word “cool.”
The audience of fashion insiders, on the other hand, could be taken collectively to define the verbs “to broil,” ”to melt” or even the noun “sauna.”
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The start of Paris’ menswear collections was unusually chilly for June, but temperatures soared Sunday to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) – a nightmare scenario for a crowd of elaborate dressers reluctant to remove blazers, corsets or any other essential but asphyxiating element of their looks.
At the Smith show, which is held in an old convent that has the advantage of freezing in winter and boiling in the summer, editors who’re normally scribbling furiously in their notebooks abandoned their pens to fan their streaming faces with the cardboard invitations. Look after hip look went by without inspiring as much as scribble or a jotted word – which was too bad, really, as the show was full of fashion forward silhouettes you could actually see make the leap from the catwalk to the street.
Nowhere did the sleeveless jacket, a top trend on other Paris runways, look as good as at Smith, where it was layered over blazers made from a patchwork of matte and shiny materials.
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