Ball Gown. Viktor & Rolf SS23 Couture

January 26, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Viktor & Rolf seem to own the “meme” couture niche. It’s all about haute ideas that have a tendency to instantly go viral. This season, the Dutch designers focused on elevating – or rather, mocking – the concept of a hysterically saccharine ball gown. The first three dresses were classically-constructed, cupcake-shaped ball gowns, with corset waists embellished with crystals and bows and sugary pastel skirts. Then came a model in a beige corset, her peach dress bobbing along 10cm in front of her, held off her body with a hidden frame, and looking as though it were being ferried along by the mice in Cinderella. One model wore her ball gown upside down, her vision completely obscured by an inverted 3-D printed bodice and layers of tightly sewn powder-blue tulle. Others wore pretty pastel creations that were slightly askew, held by a frame on an angle just off their bodies, as though they were the result of a photoshopping error. A couple wore their debutante-style dresses perpendicular to their bodies. Somehow they kept their faces humorless as they processed through the gilded ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel in sparkling Louboutin kitten heels. The effect was giggle-inducing. “It’s an absurd take on the stereotype of a couture ballgown,” said Rolf Snoeren backstage. “Which we translated for the 21st century,” added Viktor Horsting. Snoeren continued: “It comes from a love of glamour [but] like our perfume, we want it to be beautiful and we also want it to have a clever idea.” There was a comment here about internet culture and how consuming visuals on our phones – snapping photographs and immediately being able to invert them, using filters to distort and enhance our silhouettes and bone structure – has warped our sense of reality. “There is a disconnect between what we see, and the physicality of the product,” said Snoeren. Then there is the internet’s context-less state, where one scroll can take you from a fashion show to a mass shooting. “The information that comes at us, going from making banana cake to so many people being killed in Ukraine,” said Snoeren. “It’s: What kind of world are we living in? It’s absurd,” Horsting concluded.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Fantastic Drama. Miss Sohee SS23 Couture

January 26, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s not the easiest thing to be a young couture brand and try entering the Parisian haute couture schedule. South Korean newcomer Sohee Park is the most exciting emerging talent, who with confidence introduced herself to this quite intimidating scene. Last season Sohee caused quite a sensation in Milan, where she presented a fabulously theatrical collection supported by Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce. Despite being freshly graduated from London’s Central Saint Martins, showmanship was demonstrable, as was her crystal clear vision and savoir faire. Miss Sohee’s solo debut was staged in the gilded salons of the Westin Paris-Vendôme, formerly known as The Intercontinental Hotel, where the crème de la crème of French couturiers past put on memorable shows; actually it was where Yves Saint Laurent used to present his unforgettable collections. The salon was bathed in a dark, nocturnal light, setting the tone for the mood Sohee wanted to convey. She didn’t go for predictability, but took a different route from Milanese outing. “It’s always about drama and fantasy,” she explained. “But this time it’s darker, sexier. There’s lots of black, it’s such a seductive color that gives depth and mystery. I wanted to play with the idea of shadows, so I added veils and transparencies.” In contrast to last season’s voluminous concoctions, the silhouette was kept fitted to the body with corsetry to help achieve the hourglass shapes the designer was after. Intricate embroideries of flowers, birds, and insects were inspired by the paintings of a 19th century Korean artist. They graced the chiffon-and-tulle layered trails on sinuous mermaid numbers, or the heart-shaped, sequined fringed bustiers of tight-fitted satin dresses. A cascade of black crystals dropped from the neckline of a billowy, liquid cape in absinthe green satin, which looked quite sensational. There were many attractive pieces in the show; while tightly-edited, it emphasized Sohee’s range, as well as her seductive eye for embellishments and her penchant for graceful flamboyance.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Habitat. Chanel SS23 Couture

January 25, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The latest Chanel couture collection is drama-free and controversy-negative. Generally pretty and easily digestible clothes. And there were animals, too – but not in a Schiaparelli kind of way. What comes up when you research Coco Chanel’s home interior is her love for an animal theme: a model of a camel on a side-table, large bronzes of deer clustered around her fireplace, and lion effigies here, there, and everywhere. Virginie Viard collaborated with the artist Xavier Veilhan to come up with a set idea for the spring-summer 2023 couture show orbiting around Coco’s cozy habitat. A parade of something between cute Chanel drum majorettes, or perhaps, circus ringmasters, appeared on yesterday’s runway. They flipped along in their short, flared suits with the odd top hat and bow tie, shod in little white cross-laced boots with Chanel’s signature black-tipped toes. By this time, they were walking around Veilhan’s menagerie of mobile animal sculptures – a horse, lion, deer, buffalo, bird, fish, dog, and elephant – which had been trundled out to join the camel. Still, it’s not in Viard’s nature as a creative director to push a concept over clothes. Instead, here was a collection of haute couture that felt youthfully relatable. The spectacle of her march of the majorettes simply became a device for freshening up the template of Chanel day suits, led out by a charming military-jacketed number in white. That was followed by varieties of abbreviated, gilded Chanel tweeds: a short trapeze coat, de-frumpified box-pleated skirts cut as minis, and then a tiny sugar-pink coat-dress with a stand-away collar. It was a bit ’60s Mod maybe, but not too obviously. And then, at the finale, out popped the bride from a hidden door in the elephant. She was wearing a little white dress entirely covered with embroidered doves and a white bow tie. It was a charming sight.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Click-Bait Couture (And A Question For The Culture). Schiaparelli SS23 Couture

January 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Daniel Roseberry‘s spring-summer 2023 haute couture collection for Schiaparelli set the internet ablaze. In general, society feels an ease in blaming and targeting fashion – and its industry – in a whole range of humanity’s faults. It’s so frivolous, and it doesn’t have the art world’s intimidating authority to freely touch difficult topics… actually, who needs fashion? That’s why a controversy, or even a stinking hot scandal, can so easily grow out of a fashion scene. Yes, these fake – yet extremely realistic – taxidermy dresses coming from Schiaparelli’s couture atelier, without reading into further context, may instantly associate with a number of horrible crimes, from poaching endangered species to colonialism. But since when is interpreting everything without comprehending the context first a normal thing to do? Now that’s a question for the culture.

Shocking has been integral to Schiaparelli’s DNA since Elsa’s day. And Roseberry knows how to make his couture a clickbait moment for the 21st century. The designer’s mind was in fact focused on a hell – the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s relevant as ever in 2023, and the three sinful animal symbols Dante wrote of (Lion: pride; Leopard: lust; Wolf: avarice) keep on firing the minds. “The animals are one of the four literal references that I took from Dante’s Inferno,” Roseberry explained . “In the first cycle of Dante’s journey, he faces terrors. He confronts a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. They each represent different things. But the lion and the animals are there as a photorealistic approaching of surrealism and trompe l’oeil in a different way.” Roseberry found a creative parallel to his dilemmas in the hellish tortures Dante allegorized. “It’s the agony of wanting to surprise,” he said. “I just want it to be powerful in a different way every time.” His ambition: to “show the impossible.” Regarding the three, now-infamous looks, I will admit they felt too costume-y for me in the first place. It’s a great shame that all the explosive attention drawn by overshadowed the extraordinary work Roseberry and his team lavished on molding, sculpting, and embellishing the majority of the collection. The waisted shape of the classic Schiaparelli Shocking! perfume bottle was transmuted into extreme hourglass silhouettes, corseted in the back. There were ‘plastrons’ of stiffly exaggerated, up-to-the-eyeline bustiers (crafted in mother-of-pearl, marquetry, and broken glass jewelry). He also dealt out incredibly silhouetted trouser suits, vertiginously plunging tuxedos, and a pinstripe which had mind-boggling lines imitating menswear fabric, but curving in and out in some visually unaccountable way. Would the collection look in overall better without the faux-animal drama? Probably. But would it grab the Internet’s attention? Of course, not.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Beginning. Valentino AW22 Couture

July 10, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Amada mia, amore mio! Ah! ah!

For Valentino’s spectacular autumn/winter 2022 haute couture show, creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli returned to Rome, where Valentino Garavani founded the storied maison back in 1959. Otherworldly bodies descending from the Spanish Steps in the golden evening sun, the romantic voice of Labrinth echoing from beneath the Trinità dei Monti… well, that was a scene. “I start from the finale, always,” Pierpaolo Piccioli said during a preview in Paris days before the show. “What I have in mind is these liquid, colourful drops coming down from the Steps, the volumes light and in movement.” He titled his show The Beginning: a return to the city where Valentino Garavani founded his maison, a place that has moved with the winds of change since the dawn of time. Like Piccioli’s Valentino, Rome’s codes may remain the same but its values are in eternal evolution. That was the sentiment behind a show he envisioned as “a conversation with Valentino” across the past, the present and the future. Piccioli had been dreaming of doing a show on the 18th-century steps. “It’s very personal. The last time Valentino did a show on the Spanish Steps was in the 1990s. It was a different moment in fashion. It was about lifestyle and the perfection of beauty, the glamour, the supermodels,” he reflected. “I wanted to get the spirit of Valentino – the joie de vivre – because I think it’s the only way of making beauty resilient to the time. On the other hand, there’s a picture I want to deliver, which is different from what it was 45 years ago. It’s the picture of what we live in. The Spanish Steps are the same, the atelier is the same, and in the end, clothes are clothes. I like to keep the rituals of haute couture. But the real difference is in the casting – in the humans – that can tell stories and witness a different moment in this world. I want to empower them and give them a voice and the opportunity to tell their own stories.”

Piccioli’s approach to the show manifested in a collection that didn’t just poeticise the decades-long legacy of Valentino Garavani, but his own contributions to the house. Rather than pursuing newness, he reflected on what Valentino stands for after 14 years under his own artistic directorship (and 23 years as an employee). Unless you’d spent those years under a rock, you’d immediately recognise the resplendent volumes of his dresses, suits and coats, the hypnotising hues of his gem colours, and the drama of his plumed headpieces bouncing like jellyfish in the stream of the Roman evening breeze. “I wanted to do a reflection about how much of myself is in Valentino, and how much of Valentino is in my identity,” he said. “It’s everything I’ve already done but in a different place.” Piccioli’s era at Valentino has followed a time of political divide when the progressive values he fights for – the diversity, inclusivity and self-expression represented in his casting – are contrasted by a rise of reactionary ideas that has only become terrifyingly evident with recent American Supreme Court rulings. In that sense, moments like the Spanish Steps show – these grand gestures of beauty – are a kind of activism on his part. It may be wrapped in majestically coloured taffeta, three-dimensional geometric plumage painstakingly made to evoke Roman mosaics, or voluminous hand-sequined suits, but at the core of Piccioli’s haute couture is a dream that cuts deeper than mind-blowing craftsmanship. “I believe that it’s my responsibility as a fashion designer to bear witness to the times we’re living in,” he said. “I think that beauty has the power to break through, touch people and their conscience. Taking a radical posture through a strong narration and through images of a world that’s changing has an impact, and gives visibility to values that have to be protected. I believe fashion can be political.” With the likes of Naomi Campbell and Anne Hathaway on the front row the show was testament to the global impact of the new age of haute couture that Piccioli has spearheaded in recent years. But as illustrated by the people who joined them – Valentino’s co-founder Giancarlo Giammetti, Piccioli’s family, and their dog Miranda – it’s a success achieved through a grounded approach to the industry, to the mainstream fame he has gained, and everything that comes with it. At the heart of Piccioli’s progression-driven age of Valentino are a realness, friendliness and ease that remain his greatest assets.