The Dita Von Teese Louboutin SS27 production, staged on a Friday evening of Paris Fashion Week inside the grand Théâtre du Châtelet, was titled Eternal Youth: A Fairytale of Empowerment, and it set out to do something that most fashion presentations no longer attempt: to make an argument. A genuine, considered, almost philosophical argument about the difference between glamour and the mere desire to be seen.
Von Teese played a star of the stage whose younger co-star is, rather satisfyingly, dispatched with a glitter gun. From that moment, the performance became an all-dancing odyssey about reclaiming inner power. The message that Christian Louboutin wanted to land was precise: glamour, as a concept, is not the same as grabbing for attention. It is an inherent capacity to enchant. In an attention economy built on sensationalised content that loudly demands our focus, Louboutin’s view is that this particular quality has become a forgotten art.
A Production Built for the Théâtre du Châtelet
The show was developed under the artistic direction of Louboutin alongside French set and costume designer Bruno de Lavenère, whose credits, according to WWD, include collaborations with the Paris Opera and the Bolshoi Theatre, and co-designing the scenography for the Paris Olympic Games’ opening ceremony. The choice of collaborator was not incidental: this was a production conceived with operatic scale and theatrical rigour.
The evening alternated Von Teese’s signature burlesque acts with choreography by Josépha Madoki and Bachana Chanturia of Bachana Dance Company. Between those sequences came intermezzos of modern music, arias by soprano Catherine Trottmann, and classical repertoire from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Vivaldi, performed by the Appassionato choir and orchestra under conductor Mathieu Herzog. It was, in short, a proper production, not a fashion presentation with theatrical pretensions but an actual theatrical event that happened to be animated by the Louboutin world.
Von Teese herself was precisely as wonderful as you would hope. Her signature black hair was curled into its perfectly satisfying lick and topped with a crown by Stephen Jones. She wore a white bejewelled corset by corsetry legend Mister Pearl and a delicate matching cape by John Galliano. She applied her famous red lip before an oversized dressing-room mirror, flew above the stage suspended by scarlet ribbons, and culminated proceedings with a striptease revealing sparkling nipple covers before being doused in gold glitter. At one point, Louboutin himself made a cameo, flying around the stage and flipping upside down in a red soldier suit. The crowd, entirely correctly, adored every second of it.
Dita Von Teese Louboutin SS27: Who Was in the Audience
The Théâtre du Châtelet drew what one might describe as a genuinely eclectic front row. WWD reported the audience included Heidi Klum, Daphne Guinness, Pom Klementieff, Kelsea Ballerini, Law Roach, Huda Kattan, Ellen von Unwerth and Lena Mahfouf, which is, whatever else you say about it, a room of people with a known interest in spectacle. Daphne Guinness, in particular, is the kind of attendee who suggests the organisers understood exactly what they were doing: this is an event for people who genuinely believe in the transformative power of dressing, rather than those cataloguing it for content.
What stayed with you afterwards was the clarity of the show’s central premise. Fashion presentations often gesture at ideas without quite committing to them. This one committed. The Dita Von Teese Louboutin SS27 evening was built around a single, articulable belief about glamour, and it sustained that belief through an hour of theatre, music, choreography and a fairly spectacular quantity of gold glitter. The result was something that felt, in the best possible way, entirely out of step with how fashion tends to show itself to the world right now. Which was, of course, entirely the point.
The full show is documented at Christian Louboutin‘s official site.
