Walter Van Beirendonck

‘What would it be like to be at home with Walter Van Beirendonck?’, was a question you found yourself asking at the Palais Garnier.

For starters, all your shoes would have cocks and balls appliquéd on them. He’d put glitter in your shampoo – though Christopher Shannon, who showed the     look in London over a week before might want a word about that – and turn your baseball cap into elongated wicker (courtesy of the brilliant Stephen Jones).

Titled Home Sweet Home, Van Beirendonck’s tailoring was sliced and spliced to evoke rooms. On the soundtrack, Porcelain Raft’s Talk to Me featured the line “I can show you where Duchamp lives,” and if not that artist there was a surreal feeling to the scenes that became walking canvases.

Is home wherever you lay your hat? Especially when you’re dressed like bricks, mortar and soft furnishings? That’s debatable.
What’s not is Walter’s place on the Paris menswear schedule; always stimulating, always entertaining. He earned these temporary digs, a gilded round salon under the Paris Opéra.