At Lanvin, Bouchra Jarrar is Playing Many Women’s Tune

PARIS — And so to the second major debut of the season: Bouchra Jarrar at Lanvin.

Often when designers (or their teams) are describing what they are trying to do with collections, the result can be relatively surreal. Witness the Maison Margiela show notes, which declared, “Our evolving proposition stimulates nostalgia and innovation in equal parts. We believe that familiarity must be unsettled and spontaneous, with an intrinsic strangeness” — a somewhat tortured description of what turned out to be an engaging, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink combination of shredded georgette and athletic mesh; velvet, faux fur and pink plexiglass; cotton jacquard and rubberized grapes; sophistication and sport, complete with yoga mats rolled atop a pink plaid backpack, gem encrusted gauntlets and scuba shoes.

But when Ms. Jarrar said she was “searching for refinement and harmony,” you could see it in the result: a lullaby in black and white; satin, silk, and crepe de Chine: wrapped in 24-karat chain-mail chokers with a dab of 1980s bling and a grown-up attitude.

Liquid striped men’s wear suiting was paired with elongated chiffon shirts in a contrasting stripe left to flow out the back; white satin slip-dresses draped on one side to reveal a cowl lined in black; and pencil skirts slit to one thigh paired with bibbed tuxedo shirts winking sheer at the back and sides. Ms. Jarrar’s signature motorcycle jackets — sleeveless; leather; extravagantly, iridescently feathered — were matched with fragile floor-sweeping pleated skirts.

To anyone who has followed Ms. Jarrar’s career, many pieces would look familiar from her own line, transplanted to Lanvin and given a rhinestone-refracted glow. What they were not, however, was a karaoke version of what had come from before, which is a good thing.

(This is also increasingly the case with John Galliano at Maison Margiela: He has mostly stopped trying to go through the motions of mechanically incorporating the house’s heritage in his work, and instead is doing his own hectic collaging of time periods and inspirations, to relatively successful effect.)

If the new Lanvin never reached orchestral crescendo, it was not meant to; rather, it moved lyrically along, a felicitous marriage of aesthetic and imperative. High notes were a billowing poppy-print gown that floated around the body like a breeze, and a white sleeveless sheath twisted into a knot at the waist — though schmatta-like nightdresses with see-through panels at the sides and big rhinestone buttons at the neck fell kind of flat.

Lanvin has come through a complicated time (by some accounts still continuing), but these clothes were absent cacophony or discord. Shown, as has become something of a trend this season, on a range of models new and more mature, they balanced age and innocence, what is revealed and what is concealed, good taste and bad.

With this collection, Ms. Jarrar is playing many women’s tune.

Hopefully management will now give her the support she needs to continue to flesh out the rhythm. She has already started adding the (cobalt) blues.