Paris Fash­ion Week is in play. The Fall 2009 ready-to-wear run­ways are brim­ming with prac­ti­cal, beau­ti­ful clothes, and not much jew­elry. Still, there were a few notable per­spec­tives. In these state­ments, it wasn’t the type of orna­ment that was ter­ri­bly new, or even new-ish; it was in the artistry of styling them where the inno­va­tion felt freshest.

Junya Watan­abe Fall RTW 2009

Junya Watan­abe Fall RTW 2009

Junya Watan­abe put the puffer under the fash­ion micro­scope, exam­in­ing every nuance in shape and sil­hou­ette. The addi­tion of chains, as accoutrement/accessory, gave the coats an ele­vated ori­en­ta­tion of the kind that Burberry’s did just a cou­ple of sea­sons ago, when they tossed on those strands of fringe. It seem that the chain, a sta­ple of most clos­ets and jew­elry boxes, can be re-purposed to work with almost any­thing, and under Watanabe’s artis­tic author­ity, they func­tion as both clo­sure and embellishment.

Lan­vin Fall RTW 2009

The chunky neck­lace worn as one would a turtle­neck sweater is how I would describe the look above. The archi­tec­tural inter­play of orna­ments, their muted color, and tower-like assem­blage is spec­tac­u­lar with­out being tawdry.

Lan­vin Fall RTW 2009

Con­trast this idea with this one, where the woman, bare and LBD’d, is piled sim­i­larly with large neck­laces. The jew­els, vary­ing in mate­ri­als and dif­fer­ences in length, work like a scarf. The neck is enveloped, and almost unde­tectable, beneath the jew­elry. The empha­sis is placed on the face and the gar­ment; an age­less con­cept in the­ory, if not always in prac­tice, and not nec­es­sar­ily in this instance either.

Karl Lager­feld Fall RTW 2009

When I first viewed these objects on Karl Lagerfeld’s RTW run­way, I wasn’t sure what they were. Actu­ally, I’m still not. They seem to be dis­tant cousins of chain link armor and envelop the entire the ear. Is the news of the world so bad that we need to block its entrance into our psy­che, but in Mr. Lagerfeld’s world, should look good doing it? These funny lit­tle orna­ments are flat­ter­ing against the model’s full, rip­pling hair but, again, that’s a styling con­cept, not nec­es­sar­ily the func­tion of the jewel itself. This is not for every woman. The prob­lem is that there just aren’t enough of us with the com­mand­ing pres­ence of Zena.