The Verdict on Peter Copping’s Debut at Lanvin

Style|Clothes for Savvy, Elegant Adults? What an Idea.

So begins the year of fashion change. First out of the gate: Lanvin, where Peter Copping, who took the creative reins in September, wasn’t just tasked with giving an old name a reboot because, you know, consumers were bored and the bags just weren’t selling — he essentially had to resuscitate it.

For while Lanvin likes to identify itself as the oldest French couture house in continual existence, using the word “existence” in relationship to the brand over the past decade might have been stretching the matter. Since Alber Elbaz left in 2015, it has been more like a maison on life support after a series of designers whose names no one can really remember so scrambled its identity that it had drifted into near-total irrelevance. Mr. Copping’s job was to shock it back into action.

The stakes were high, not just for Lanvin, but for the designer himself, who had done brief stints as the creative director of Nina Ricci and Oscar de la Renta, where he had the unenviable job of taking over after Mr. de la Renta’s death in 2014, and was fired pretty quickly after a clash with management. He has spent the past few years behind-the-scenes at Balenciaga, first as head of couture and then running special projects and V.I.P. dressing.

Lanvin was a chance, once again, to make his voice heard, and to demonstrate what happens when his signature affinity for a bit of French flou gets tempered by the challenge of Demna’s dark vision at Balenciaga.

Did he?

Well, although Mr. Copping’s first show was more like an EpiPen injection than defibrillator paddles, it still offered a carefully calibrated dose of adrenaline.

Which is to say it provided a convincing statement about what a certain kind of beguilingly twisted sophistication might look like at the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century. If the residents of the Bauhaus ended up on the board of a tech company and then threw themselves down on a Le Corbusier daybed for a gin fizz after a long day of debating the future and an evening of Champagne schmoozing, this is what they might wear.