Nana Aganovich and her partner Brooke Taylor (of the label AGANOVICH) hosted one of Paris Fashion Week’s first presentation’s today on the Place des Vosges, ushering guests into a small gallery dominated by a cloth-covered circular stage, occupied by two empty deckchairs. The venue was decorated by a Francis Bacon-inspired oil painting, a reference that became clear when a clownish mime artist entered the stage and begun a lengthy philosophical dialogue on the nature of art and life with a suited businessman perched on the opposite chair. Once their perfectly-executed musings had come to an end, an installation of “House of Horrors” curved mirrors was constructed and the show began, with each model’s walk being reflected and distorted as she walked around the stage.

Bacon’s work translated as a layered study in coloured silk organzas for Aganovich and Taylor, with which they played with a masterful manipulation of this fabric’s structural qualities to create volume with darts and tucks, both symmetrical and not. A tart palette of nude, coral, mocha and pale turquoise layers were worked together in various permutations of shift dresses, pinafores and cutaway blouses, topped off by stiff berets (by new London milliner J Smith Esquire) and rounded sunglasses from Cutler & Gross. These accessories added to the absurdist nature of the presentation, which was further referenced to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Marlow’s realisation that ‘the world is more inverted than he had thought’.

The designers riffed on abstract interpretations of 1950s silhouettes, with jackets featuring cocooning backs and inlaid belts worn over v-neck smocks. More unusual attempts to further their concept resulted in a batwing trench coatdress with a high funnel neck and a one-armed cape dress (the former was more successful, in it’s crisp construction and finishing).