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Ann Demeulemeester: Growing Old With Grace

An elegiac series of images Saturday afternoon by Ann Demeulemeester dedicated to the ability to age gracefully made for easily the best fashion moment so far in the French season.

Presented on a casting that opened with poetic teenagers and ended with agreeably grizzled dandies it summed up this spring 2009 collection’s anti-ageism theme. Aptly it was staged in an old medical wing of the Sorbonne University.

"The art of growing old," explained the designer, adding that her inspiration was "The Glassbeadgame," Hermann Hesse’s novel set in the 25th century in a province dedicated to the life of the mind.

Rarely has a men’s fashion show unfolded more poetically than this one, where curly haired youths in rocker colonial garb opened the event: wearing flat black raffia hats, off duty military jackets, semi shrunken vests and curiously religious sandals with one big toe strap. Made in black, bold beige and gray stripes and uneven polkadots, the clobber also captured a big current designer obsession – mega light fabrics.

In an age obsessed with global warming, designers have reacted by showing ever less substantial fabrics - see through linen, airy silks and feathery cottons, even Demeulemeester, a designer known for a signature downtown rocker style.

With a violin concerto wafting through the garden, the clothes morphed from black to white, and the average age of the models soared well into the pensioner era.

A dignified phalange of Paraty posada owners and high priests blessed with private incomes, they all looked really great, attired in colonial rum baron white linen and jute like redingotes.

It was a brilliant sleight of hand for Queen Ann, flipping the preoccupations of our obsessed culture on their ear and granting a vision of how cool it can be to grow old with panache.

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