The year 1997 was a good one for Americans in Paris. Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors were hired to design for Louis Vuitton and Celine, respectively, and Narciso Rodriguez was installed at Cerruti. All three brought fresh eyes, and a certain pragmatism, to French luxury, which just then was getting a rethink, as the industry was being organized into streamlined conglomerates.
Rodriguez’s fall line-up was a fitting sequel to his stellar spring offering. And it’s from this collection that Kate Moss selected her unforgettable—and rule-breaking—Cannes look, a simple-looking, gray sheath with a hint of Hitchockian glamour. (Christina Kruse wore it on the runway.)
“It had some pretty intricate seaming up the back that shaped and kind of molded the body, but the front was quite pure,” Rodriguez recalls. “The color and material was unusual for a bias sheath like that. It was made modern by the texture of it and the stretch in it. It wasn’t lined, you know, something like that in Hitchcock days would be boned and heavy and lined, and this was a second skin.”
*The collection contained other body-loving looks, like a fishnet lace column worn over a maillot by Chandra North. Cerruti was a menswear house first, so Rodriguez “feminized” suiting fabrics by adding stretch and cutting them on the bias. Nothing in this collection feels extraneous, which is true of Rodriguez’s oeuvre as a whole. What the designer describes as the simplicity and logic of Moss’s dress applies to all his work, and to some extent, to American design in general.
“We in fashion sometimes lose our way, and talk about trends or create things that just aren’t wearable, or useful, or necessary. We do it for the runway…and this [collection] was the anti-that,” Rodriguez says. “I remember coming home and sitting with Carolyn [Bessette-Kennedy] and watching the whole show. She got up and she sat closer to the TV and she turned around and smiled and was like, ‘this is how I want to look.’ You couldn’t ask for a better compliment.”