On paper, there ought to be a disconnect between high fashion, which is made for the .001%, and work-a-day denims. Although humble in origin, denim has grow to be so ubiquitous that the authors of International Denim, a scholarly e book on the topic, report, “maybe the vast majority of all the inhabitants of this planet is sporting blue denims on any given day.” Should you consider that considered one of style’s capabilities is to be a form of mirror to the instances, that staggering statistic is strictly the explanation why denims ought to have a spot on these rarified runways. They converse to the casualness and luxury of contemporary apparel.

Within the early post-war interval, generally known as the Golden Age of couture, exhibits may final an hour or longer and encompass greater than a 100 appears to be like, for sunup to sunset. Over time, and because the viewers for couture shrunk, the exhibits began to tackle extra of a advertising perform and the emphasis shifted to special-occasion appears to be like.

Extra just lately, a lot of designers have began addressing that imbalance and designing for daytime as effectively. One of many inflection factors of the autumn 2023 couture season was Valentino’s present opener, a pair of trompe l’oeil denims made from silk gazar embellished with beads in 80 hues of indigo. (There was a pair of denim denims with gold embroidery within the line up as effectively.) Right here was a wedding of ease and glamour achieved with painstaking artisanal savoir-faire. It’s the form of paradox that Pierpaolo Picciolo delights in. And it received me eager about different examples of denim or denim-like supplies on the couture runways.

The primary instance I may discover was from Jean Paul Gaultier, who has all the time resisted bourgeois guidelines and morés in favor of freedom. The Frenchman established his personal maison de couture in 1997 and his debut assortment included denim labored as any luxurious cloth can be. An extended skirt, for instance, featured the form of floral embroidery you might need seen at court docket in Marie Antoinette’s day.

Among the denims in that 1997 Gaultier present had been upcycled. Ronald van der Kemp has primarily based his couture profession on a reuse strategy, and when Demna relaunched couture Balenciaga in 2021, he created a bridge between previous and current, by working denim into architectural shapes.