Brand Assassination

Courrèges, Nina Ricci, Sonia Rykiel, Paco Rabanne, Mugler, Emanuel Ungaro & Kenzo

 

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The names above are some of the greatest heritage brands to ever come out of Paris and yet look at the atrocities here and see if you can possibly match any of this garbage to any of these once majestic and revered brands. 

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The impetus for this piece is the “murderer” at Courrèges and then the others are just accomplices to the crimes. Do you blame the designer or do you blame the ownership?

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What's the point in perpetuating a brand that has a long and groundbreaking history and throwing it all out the window to produce generically ugly and absurd looking clothes that probably will never sell .... seems rather pointless

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Courrèges was probably the first to ever discover and espouse minimalism, Kenzo once known for his technicolor florals and happy clothes, Rabanne for his groundbreaking use of metal, Ungaro for creating clothes screamed sex, Mugler was one of the architects of fashion and the extreme, Ricci for its jolie madame/soigné and elegance and Sonia for her irreplaceable knits… can you match any of those names to any of these images? 

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It is a crime against fashion and fashion media that any of this crap is acceptable under these labels. Critics talk around the clothes since there are no clothes to speak about that anyone will want.  

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The French who are so full of their so called pride in product should be ashamed of themselves and as for the coverage that these collections that they receive... well the  least these eponymous designers deserve is the honesty that the collection that now bears their name is to be called out for what they are …. Tasteless generic crap!

Emanuel Ungaro fall 2016 PFW

 Emanuel Ungaro will forever be remembered for his ’80s pomp and poufs… so says the tee shirt collector and fashion maven and supposed authority Nicole Phelps! Here’s the problem, Ungaro will be remembered for overtly sexy, shirred, draped, hyper feminine clothes, polka dots,  florals, peplums, body hugging second skin dresses, a riot of color and pattern, cabans and a host of other characteristics but alas not a pouf in sight. Phelps must have Ungaro confused with Lacroix and I am not equipped to explain the pomp part unless of course pomp means incredible statement making clothes... which I doubt!

 

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No matter how inaccurate the opening assessment, Fausto Puglisi is like the little train that could! He keeps trying but he never pulls into the station. I can assure you that one descriptor that was never applied to the work of Emanuel Ungaro is matronly; Not only matronly in the most obvious ways but boring as well which is another word that has never been used to describe Ungaro. Long ago when I was a buyer, my mentor boss, a woman, instilled in me that women who buy these clothes wanna get laid well that aint happening here in a bomber jacket or some printed shirtwaist dress.

 

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It is incomprehensible to me that these heritage brands have huge archives from which to work and yet their designers fail to hit the mark season after season by trying to reinvent the wheel. I understand moving forward but to me this is moving backward to cuffed gauchos and fur trimmed coats and amazingly stuck on those freakin bomber jackets that have flooded every retail tier of fashion. Doncha think it’s time to quit the bomber and move on or go back... go anywhere but there! The below the knee looks compound the felonies and a deep vee neck on “uniform” looking dress does not read sexy, it reads who cares or where the underpinnings or why does that day dress have such a low cut neck.

 

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So let’s say that no matter which of the 2 decades Puglisi thinks he is referencing... 70s or 80s... he obviously got it wrong. Those 2 decades were rife with fashion of every kind. There was excess in the extreme. Good taste, bad taste and every kind of sartorial display imaginable and he came up with boring. To say that fashion rocked in those days would be an understatement. Think Studio 54, trophy wives, wildly sex inspired clothes, think tarty, even think slutty, think nouveau society but never think ho hum.

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Emanuel Ungaro.. Paris ..spring 2015

The time has come to speak openly about one of the great fabled heritage brands that flourished for so many years under its eponymous designer; Emanuel Ungaro was a master of drape, fabric, construction, detail and most of all women. This was a man who adored women and showed it season after season with the clothes that he showed. women absolutely cooed and oohed to won those clothes and men’s tongues hung out looking at women who wore them no matter of it was a jersey dress , a wool suit or a balls out evening gown.

Thru an unfortunate series of mostly ill equipped designers and a shorter string of inexperienced owners we arrive to the present when the latest designer is once struggling to recapture what once was. One thing you can be sure of and it is this, what once is certainly not what was shown on the runway today. Can we say it is an embarrassment to the name and even worse that Monsieur Ungaro is still alive to see this pile that carries his name? As was pointed out to me there is a great difference between a Madame Claude girl and one that works a corner in Pigalle and you can guess who wears the current collection.

 As a rare occurrence, in the slide show, you will be able to compare and see what is being written about. Monsieur Ungaro’s collections are as viable now as they were then and maybe even more so if tweaked by the proper “hands.” What was once sexy remains sexy what was once trashy remains trashy and cheap looking. Think about it as this is a prime example of why try to revive a heritage brand using a designer who hasn’t a clue about how to go about it. The DNA is there.

PS if ones only way of expressing and transmitting sex is via T&A then you came to the wrong brand

Emanuel Ungaro resort 2015

Well, we return to somewhat familiar ground here and the question that begs to be asked is this; “why take a heritage brand, initiate a so-called brand revival and then exterminate and eviscerate all the DNA and vocabulary that make the brand famous?”  Chew on that for a bit!!!

Case in point here is Emanuel Ungaro. Ask anyone to tell you what the brand stood for and they will tell you that Ungaro was all about sex and feminine clothes. They might associate the following with the brand as well: polka dots, shirring, draping, get lucky quick, tight, jersey, suits, dresses, florals, cabans, black and white and color. I should have prefaced that by saying that you would have to be older than 30 and possess fashion acumen that extends beyond descriptors such as fierce and fab. In other words, one might have had to know what it meant to be designed by the eponymous designer, if in fact you ever knew there was one!

This atrocity bearing the name is just one more effort to use/prostitute a brand in order to further the career of some nascent talent. M. Puglisi has extrapolated some of the DNA and turned it laughable and cartoonish and then to ice the cake he plunges the brand into the ocean of sameness as it was just a uniform for the fashion clueless. In what galaxy does a photo image of Madame Dubarry bear any relationship to the brand other than they are both French. This bit of so called genius is a tired attempt to cash in on what Tisci already built a reputation on by ruining Givenchy.

Let’s go a few steps further and talk about the Prada like details, the over use of studs and spikes and one more time the absurd droopy clumsy fit that is pervasive within the world of fashion. In other words WTF are you thinking here? If anything, Ungaro was the designer who was copied or referenced and not the one who used others as a way of building his business. And now we are back to this; “DESIGNERS WHO DESIGN!”

It is my opinion that this designer should stick to building his own brand and walk away from a position that only bolsters the demise of fashion rather than the rise of fashion as long as he is at the helm! Take a history lesson and learn what it means to design for a heritage brand and not just apply your misguided interpretations upon that brand.

I’m done now …rant over!