more hardcore territory in recent seasons

Paris’s most romantic label tapped into the raw emotion of Wuthering Heights – its models like modern-day Heathcliffs racing breathlessly across the moors in billowing silks and lustrous microfibres.
After veering into edgier, more hardcore territory in recent seasons, Sunday’s collection was pure, unadulterated feeling.
The looks – windblown parkas, their silken hoods trailing behind like scarves, and suits in a rainbow of dusty hues – faintly quivered with raw sentiment.
Even the more stringent looks that opened the show – inspired, menswear designer Lucas Ossendrijver said, by security guards because “everybody loves a man in uniform” – breathed poetry.
“‘Boys can cry,’ that’s our message,” the label’s artistic director Alber Elbaz said in a post-show interview, adding that he and Ossendrijver were careful to avoid turning their emotionally-charged men into wimps.
“Women were always strong. Men were powerful. Now women are strong and powerful – that’s a deadly combination,” Elbaz said. “We wanted to go back to the essence of masculinity, which is leather, which is the uniform,” and inject that “with the fragility and emotion that has become our DNA at Lanvin.”
The collection, shown beneath the frescoed dome of a Paris stock exchange, hit the sweet spot between strength and sentiment without veering into the overtly feminine territory that has swept other catwalks here, where the man skirt has emerged as a major trend.
Lanvin’s khaki tunics in the thinnest of leathers, its perfectly-cut pleated trousers, and its sculptural double-breasted jackets all managed to be at once manly and emotive.

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