Looks like a Cover-Up

By Kate Betts/Paris

Taking cover is the theme of the Paris fall 2006 collections. Wave adieu to the frilly ladylike look and navel-baring sexuality of past seasons. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci put his bespectacled models into stiff dresses and opaque tights. At Rochas, the modest mood was reflected in Olivier Theyskens' skinny, chimney-sweeper-inspired pantsuits and monastic evening gowns. The color du jour: soot black.

These were elegant renditions of fashion's sober new mood. But some designers took the trend to an extreme, covering models' heads with paper-bag-like scarves, as the Japanese designer Jun Takashi did at Undercover, or at the show of Dutch duo Viktor & Rolf, shielding faces with fencing masks.

Among the front-row crowd--an international group of buyers and press--there were whispers of the "Muslimification" of fashion. Were designers responding to conflicts in the Middle East by stitching some kind of political message into their silhouettes? Historically, many designers have explored the veiling concept. At Balenciaga, a cyclamen head scarf that appeared at the end of the show was a replica of a similar one Cristobal Balenciaga designed in the '60s. Politics has surfaced in the past too. Eight years ago, the Turkish designer Hussein Chalayan presented a collection modeled by women in chadors.

"Right now there's so much happening in the Middle East that it's top of mind, it's not by accident," says Paris-based shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who recently returned from a tour of Riyadh and Dubai. Miuccia Prada, who showed her Miu Miu collection in Paris, at first resisted pegging her work this season as political. But she admitted that, for the first time, she felt the urge to "take more consciousness and more power for women." Her clothes--black anoraks and heavy shoes--reminded her of the more reactive '60s and '70s, she said. "In the end, we designers are really just looking for a new way to dress," she added. "The super-exposure of nudity seems not to have given much happiness to women."