Isabel Marant

Paris Fashion Week: Isabel Marant autumn/winter 2012

 

Isabel Marant autumn/winter 2012 Photo: AFP

Lucky Luke - France's beloved, eternally-smoking, lugubrious cartoon cowboy - would have loved this. For following last season's bulky riff on big-numbered collegiate sportswear, Isabel Marant today leapt much more successfully back into an Americana-saddle with collection that galloped gleefully across the entire range of Wild West tropes.

Cowboys may be one of America's toughest male archetypes, but they sure did like plenty of purty, feminine decoration on their clobber. Marant raided it all to recast the uniform of prairie men for gun-slinging Paris gamines.

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Mother of pearl buttons ran down studded satin shirts panelled in black and ochre with prettily contra-coloured piping on the shoulder next to desert flower reliefs. Jeans and suede trousers that were cut slim and stopped at the base of the calf had three gleaming stud-buttons on the leg, more foliage snaking up north and butterflies fluttering at the hip pockets. The cowboy shirt was reinvented as a bomber jacket - very cool - and the cowboy boot transformed into a spur-heeled cowboy shoe-bootie with an ammunition belt strap at the ankle.

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It was not all about cowboys, though: the Wild West's feminine tropes took a bow too. The star was every Western's ruffle-tastic, lace-bedecked, seen-it-all saloon bar heroine, but with the hemlines radically rehashed from full-length to barely any length at all. And there were some studded or stencilled, laser-cut minis in leather that had more material in the arm than the leg. It was a mighty powerful look: had Lucky Luke seen Marant's cowgirls, he would have dropped that cigarette and barely noticed the loss.