Contrasts of Femininity. Jean Paul Gaultier SS24 Couture

January 25, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

When Jean Paul Gaultier announced Simone Rocha as the guest designer for the spring-summer 2024 haute couture collection, it was clear that this unexpected match would result in an intriguing dialogue between Parisian artisanship and the Irish designer’s idiosyncratic take on femininity. The way Rocha interpreted the iconic JPG cone-bra into thorn-shaped protrusions signaled that she, unlike the previous guest creatives, will take a closer look at the couturier’s interest in the female body. This took her to the idea of playing with contrasts of couture: the tension between restraint and fragility. “His love of the breast and the hip and the female form – exploring that and harnessing it,” the designer said, explaining all the skirts and gowns buffeted with crinoline panniers and bustles. Corseting, another Gaultier landmark signature, seemed to be Rocha’s favorite element to play with. The designer treated the corset “as a security and this kind of second skin on the body.” The tattoo prints earned certain pagan mysticism in her hands, something I always love about her London shows. Meanwhile Breton stripes were represented by navy ribbons tied into bows and tacked loosely to illusion tulle, which also appeared on offbeat padded underpants. This was definitely a noteworthy fashion experiment to unpack.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Margaret. Chanel SS24 Couture

January 24, 2024January 24, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

“He met Margaret on a rooftop, she was wearin’ white,

And he was like, ‘I might be in trouble'”.

Of course, the moment I saw Margaret Qualley stepping out on the Chanel haute couture runway dressed in all-white, I had this Lana Del Rey song on my mind. Dedicated to Jack Antonoff, her friend and long-time collaborator, and his wife, Margaret, the song is an ode to hope and love, and finding answers for big questions in the right time. This Virginie Viard couture line-up, very unfairly hated by most of the critics, encapsulated that mood very well, and was yet another endeavor into a sort of unhinged femininity that isn’t exactly what the mass media keep on expecting from her Chanel. Largely inspired by ballet and the zsa zsa zsou feeling of falling in love, the collection ran from white to fondant pastels and back again. The connection to dance was flickering through the silhouette of a tweed twinset of sorts – a cropped jacket whose matching under-piece was shaped like a leotard. Other highlight: a nipped-waist, full-skirted black coat-dress puffed out on a stiff white ballerina tutu. Then, a pink chiffon dress with a shirred bodice and flyaway, textile-arty bows mixed up in its skirts. The Chanel woman is a girl at heart, but not definitely not because of a TikTok trend, but in a Sofia Coppola-kind-of-way. The finale, of course, was the Chanel bride. She had on a tiny silver-white tunic for a dress with poetic balloon chiffon sleeves and was trailing yards of white tulle as a train. Romantic, decorative, but grounded in a kind of contemporary reality. That’s Virginie Viard’s style all over.

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Schiapar-alien. Schiaparelli SS24 Couture

January 23, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Couture season has started, baby! Schiaparelli kicked of the haute week in Paris with musings on sci-fi and the future. The final result of Daniel Roseberry‘s plunge into all things Alien and Elsa Schiaparelli was, however, more about retro-tech with grand, surreal gestures. Huge funnel-like necklines disguised the face behind screens of lace; champagne-hued ballgowns with silk bows that jutted out near-endlessly appeared to defy gravity; and floor-length beaded fringes that moved energetically as if from Planet Glam all conjured astronomical flourishes of high-art-meets-high-fashion. Elsewhere, silver spine-like bijoux (a nod to Schiaparelli’s 1938 skeleton dress) that sprouted from the back of a black corset paired with a latex skirt and a polished parure, and a perfectly curved cream jacket offered all the alienistic edge a line of space-ready silhouettes could need. The mini-dress made out of discarded technology relics can be read as a comment on tech-waste, a problem that we face globally. But you can also perceive it as a new take on embellishments and embroideries. “Now, the technology I grew up with is so antiquated that it’s almost as difficult to source as certain vintage fabrics and embellishments,” said Roseberry in his show notes. Model Maggie Maurer – an IRL freshly-baked mother – carried a baby doll made from motherboards and microchips. That all might have felt quite too much for a Monday morning, but at Schiaparelli there seems no such thing as restraint.

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Twisted. Keisukeyoshida SS24

December 30, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As we’re approaching 2023’s end, I wanted to spotlight one of the most intriguing emerging designers out there: Keisuke Yoshida. “I’ve had an image of this woman in my mind,” the Japanese designer said while explaining his new collection. “In my head, she’s wearing an outfit, and I can’t tell if it is a wedding dress or a mourning dress. But somehow, I know that she’s like a mother.” Last season, Yoshida’s imaginary maternal muse had been a strict, teacher-like figure with fabric clasped tight across her throat, but this time she’s come undone. Yoshida had engineered her transformation through feminine staples, using ivory silk blouses and soft, dusty pink tailoring that bared the chest, while lapels and collars were inverted or twisted so that they poked up in awkward directions, as though they’d been pulled on in a hurry. Old wedding dresses Yoshida had found in Tokyo were reworked into one-off corsets, lace gloves, and trousers, so that embellishments of pearls and sparkly lace glistered over hands or raced across the thigh, while broken ceramics served as earrings alongside seductive secretary specs. Best of all was a would-be office-appropriate pencil skirt, out of which peeked a silk camisole whose straps dangled upside down towards the ankles. Those theatrically spiky stilettos and wide-brim hats could well have evoked Irving Penn, or old photographs of Parisian couture from the 1950s, but what makes Yoshida’s work feel right for the moment are the strange quirks he sprinkles in to humanize everything, offsetting any old-world glamour or preconceived notions of feminine mystique to create something delicately twisted.

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Girl Uninterrupted. Zimmermann SS24

December 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

I’ve never been a Zimmermann person, but since Lana Del Rey was wearing the brand’s dresses throughout her 2023 tour, I had to reinvestigate its ultra-girl charm. And I must say that I’m in love with Nicky Zimmermann‘s spring-summer 2024 offering. In a collection that contained three main and sometimes intermingling strands – sportily versatile knit pieces; volumized many-ruffled and guipure-edged georgette and charmeuse dresses; and slouchy but smart tailoring in denim and leather – you had a sense of breezy easiness. The pastel jersey looks resembled off-duty dancers’ attire, built for freedom of movement but not visually defined by technicality: a compelling alternative for the yoga-pant constituency. This sporty duality carried over into racerback white lace crops, which were used as formfitting eveningwear base layers over pretty, vaguely Sicilian baptism-gown butterfly-and-flower-pattern voile dresses edged with more cappuccino froths of lace. There was similar genre-blending in looks that placed spaghetti-strap, sometimes semi-sheer tiered mid-length backless dresses over appealingly generous, carrot-cut washed jeans, or light lace tops under textured tailoring. The dresses included a caped and draped robe in graduated dégradé patches of violet, orange, and pale yellow derived from abstract landscapes. Zimmermann said the often layered and backless flower-bomb gowns and shirtdresses had been purposefully given a washed, faded finish because “we want it to feel that the girls are walking and the flowers are just around them.” Sometimes garlanded with lace petals and handsome golden jewelry, including bunch-of-grapes earrings, these had a Dionysian freshness to them. As the viral TikTok sound sums up, “this is so Lana Del Rey vinyl“.