Fashion tries to prove women can look expert in bin bags

Paris (AFP) - Acme fashion designers set out Sunday to bear witness the saying that a stylish woman can even look good in a bin handbag.

Belgian hubby and wife squad Filip Arickx and An Vandevorst turned black plastic bin liners and dry cleaning sheaths into skirts and elaborate embroidered ball gowns in their debut Paris haute couture show.

Haute couture is the very top of the fashion world, with only an elite band of designers allowed to evidence their luxurious handmade creations in the French capital letter, some of which price tens of thousands of euros (dollars).

The pair -- collectively called A.F. Vandevorst -- fix out to challenge that aesthetic with a punkish cavalier show which likewise featured rubbish bag veils.

Rather than demure debutantes in puff assurance of taffeta and silk, some of their models had the air of runaway nightclubbing nuns.

Others wore dashing hussar jackets and trousers matched with thigh-high boots and skin-tight PVC trousers.

An Vandevorst told AFP the show was an ode to the joy of dressing upward with anything yous tin find to hand.

"Information technology's virtually total freedom and creativity, and a woman who lives out of her suitcase... transforming one-time stuff into new," she added.

"She takes things that she finds like a bin bag and embroiders it. She is so artistic that the material doesn't matter.

"She is so chichi and so sophisticated she tin turn anything with her natural flair -- poof! -- into something cracking."

A pocketbook is thus transformed into a hat, and whole line of wardrobe staples -- leggings, jackets and tops -- into head dresses and wimples.

- Americans in Paris -

In a blow to New York mode week, two loftier-terminate US labels besides made their bow on the couture catwalk alongside A.F. Vandevorst as invitee members.

Rodarte, a red-carpet favourite for Hollywood royalty like Natalie Portman and singer Katy Perry, said the label at present intends to hold all its shows in Paris.

Set upwards past sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy at their mother'due south kitchen table in Los Angeles, Rodarte'south debut Paris collection mixed their have on biker gear with ethereal silk organza and pixie flamenco frills.

Gold and silver bows turned upwards on the waist of a string of pieces in the unapologetically pretty bound summer drove which was dominated by flower motifs.

Feathered frond jackets and trouser suits that almost seemed to be made of stamens were littered through the line-up.

New York-based Proenza Schouler also chose to show its jump/summer ready to wear 2018 collection rather than the fall/winter range most other brands were presenting.

Lazaro Hernandez, one half of the design duo, said they had been talking about making the move to Paris for years.

While the Mulleavys insisted it was the French capital letter's view of mode as art that had attracted them, Hernandez said Paris "has ever been the most inspiring metropolis for us.

"We came over and we searched all these independent Parisian ateliers where they practise feather work, hand weaving textiles, ribbons (and so on), and we employed all these amazing little studios and worked back and forth from New York to Paris."

Dutch-Vietnamese designer Xuan-Thu Nguyen showed how exquisite that workmanship tin can be, with ii fake fox stoles, i made with embroidered cotton flowers and the other from similarly rendered leather catching the center.

She also had more of the wide-brimmed "tombstone hats" that are fast becoming a motif of her Xuan label.