wanneer de hittegolf ook de modeshows treft

Paris – An uninvited guest: the heat wave that hits Paris turns men’s fashion week upside down. Designers are forced to find last-minute solutions, such as moving shows forward or handing out fans and water guns.

With temperatures rising to almost 40 degrees Celsius since the middle of the week and very warm nights, sweating is inevitable regardless of the time of day.

Many shows of the fashion week, which ends on Sunday, take place at prestigious or special locations in the capital. Often outside and usually without air conditioning.

So both guests and stylists have to improvise.

“I packed a lot more outfits so I can change regularly,” Hao explains. He is at his third fashion week, which is ‘certainly the hottest’.

For Segoo Kang, a buyer from Japan, the heat “makes it really hard to concentrate on the shows.”

Jonathan Anderson’s outdoor shows for Dior on Wednesday and Rick Owens’ on Thursday have been moved to an earlier time. This is to prevent models and guests from being exposed to the stifling heat during the hottest part of the day.

48 hours before her show, designer Jeanne Friot had to move to another room in the Palais de Tokyo. The reason was the glass roof of the originally chosen space.

In the gardens of the Nissim de Camondo museum, Dior guests were given fans, small damp towels and white parasols. Waiters served special refreshing drinks, with ice cubes decorated with a flower.

At Egonlab there were empty water pistols on every seat. At the end of the show, the team sprayed the guests with this.

For Issey Miyake, the water bottles came straight from the freezer and the audience received an instant cold compress. The sidewalk was sprayed for the guests of Auralee to cool down in the queue.

Journalist Diane Pernet, a well-known presence at the shows and always dressed in black, used her Japanese-style parasol on her way to the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM) show. “I don’t want to die for fashion,” said the American, who lives in Paris. She is willing to skip shows if the stifling heat continues.

Underground location

Other designers know how to use the situation to their advantage.

The invitation to Jeanne Friot’s show on Wednesday stated that the show would take place “indoors with air conditioning” to prevent guests from dropping out at the last minute.

Some designers, like Études Studio, were lucky with their choice of location. The Parisian brand chose Galerie Basse for their collection, inspired by the work of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark. This is a large room deep in the Palais de Tokyo, even before the heat wave was predicted.

“In the end, an underground location turned out to be very suitable,” says Aurélien Arbet, one of the two artistic directors. “But there is also an element of luck involved,” acknowledges his colleague Jérémie Egry.

The heat also forces stylists to pay extra attention to their models backstage. “We try to have the models ready as late as possible and provide everything necessary to make it as comfortable as possible,” emphasizes Aurélien Arbet.

Model Jonathan Masher, twenty years old, has done several castings during this Paris fashion week: “We often wait outside in endless lines, sometimes for an hour to an hour and a half, and that in the full sun,” he says.

With the increase in intense heat waves, fashion houses will soon have no choice but to fully incorporate this factor into the creation process of collections and shows.

The designers of Études Studio indicate that “in the selection process, all materials are selected for their suitability for the climate”. They use very flexible fabrics, such as linen, lyocell, silk and organic cotton.