Deluxe Redux

This famous collection, the most memorable since Dior's debut in 1947, re-established Saint Laurent as the heir to Dior and reminded the world of the glories of the haute couture. It is significant that Saint Laurent's inspiration was Russia -- not the reality of Soviet Russia, but the memory of the Russia of the czars, which could only be found in the West, kept alive within the tradition of the Paris couture since the days of the Ballets Russes at the beginning of the century. This dream of Old Russia, conjured up by taffeta ballgowns and sable-trimmed velvet, also introduced the unabashed opulence of the fashions of the 1980s.

In subsequent seasons, Saint Laurent would draw inspiration from Imperial China, and would name his new perfume "Opium." Pierre Cardin, the designer most associated with lucrative product licensing, pioneered the introduction of capitalism in China by staging the first Western fashion show that country had seen since the advent of communism.

Fashion's encounters with real and imagined Russian and Chinese costume were an interesting counterpoint to the progress of international diplomacy and presidential summitry. In the early '80s, Karl Lagerfeld, charged with reviving the image of the house of Chanel, re-interpreted the legendary designer's "White Russian" collections of the mid-1920s. Ronald Reagan's "evil empire," characterized as a land devoid of fashion and satirized in a famous American television commercial, was nonetheless tantalizingly beautiful when envisioned on a Paris runway.

'Détente dressing'

The new president chose "Reagan Red" as his signature color, and the new first lady, the most fashion-conscious since Jacqueline Kennedy, wore a red coat and hat at her husband's first inauguration. The emergence of Raisa Gorbachev, an attractive, modern Ninotchka who was clearly interested in fashion, belied Americans' stereotypes of Russian women. Mrs. Gorbachev's encounters with Nancy Reagan were reported in the press as if they were "fashion summits" paralleling their husbands' negotiations over nuclear disarmament. "Détente dressing" at its most explicit could be found in the designs of Jean-Paul Gaultier, who sprinkled Cyrillic lettering over jackets for the fall of 1986.

"Why Russia?" mused The New York Times' Michael Gross in an April column that year, concluding that in the logic of fashion, "communists are simply so out, they're in." Gaultier's color-blocked jackets, however, also renewed fashion's links to the Russian Constructivists. Other signs of a thaw in the Cold War included Gaultier's deconstruction of the trenchcoat of the Cold War spy.

And the walls come tumbling down

The ultimate sign of things to come, however, would come when the Cold War was all but won, in the "Destroy Fashion" show staged in Paris in October of 1989. Against the setting of a rubble-strewn empty lot in an unfashionable quarter, a group of young Belgian designers -- headed by Martin Margiela -- presented torn clothes with unravelling seams, bewildering most of the international fashion press. The Deconstructivist urge to destroy the standards of Western fashion was akin to the revolutionary's need to topple a regime in order to create a new world order.

When the Berlin Wall was toppled a few weeks later, the imagery of that fashion show seemed eerily prescient. Fashion's power to anticipate the future had been demonstrated once again.