If you believe that modern fashion began with the rigorous Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, who subsequently passed the force on to Emanuel Ungaro, you may shortly come over faint. For Ungaro is now under the creative directorship of one Lindsay Lohan, an actress whose many talents don’t necessarily include rigour. She was offered the gig (alongside the lesser-known but more technically qualified Spanish designer Estrella Archs) by Ungaro’s president and CEO, Mounir Moufarrige, the self-same who slotted a certain pop star’s daughter into the top job at Chloé a decade ago.True, her qualifications are of the pragmatic variety: she’s a shopaholic (“you should see my hotel room,” she told me when I viewed the collection before the show, “it’s a mess, with clothes everywhere”). But she’s reasonably clued up about quality and fabric. And she’s stylish. This season she’s chanelling Balmain, “but it’s so expensive”. Well, she won’t need to shop there any more.
Inevitably, some of that tough-sexy Balmain silhouette seeped into this show — plus skinny trousers, sequined jackets, a skirt so teeny that I thought it was a boob tube when I saw it on the rail, and some nifty dresses with brush-stroke patterns. As a show it was underwhelming, but they had three weeks to put it together. Obviously she’ll be red-carpeting it like crazy. Obviously, for the first time in several years, Ungaro will get written up everywhere. Is this enough to sustain a venerable French house? For the next six or seven minutes,
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