by Evi Karatza
....
““I wanted to use waves of color in this collection—but taken from
things you use in everyday life, I also was looking for different
silhouettes to emphasize embroidery and embellishments”, she said
backstage and, Katrantzou scarcely needed to add, to frame those
extraordinary prints that have propelled her lickety-split to the top of
the London fashion class.
Hence a godet skirt, so difficult to
engineer print-wise that she made only four of them. Or frothing
torrents of chiffon. Or a strictly corseted shape she’d extracted from
some historical research (specifically Elizabethan England) without,
she was quick to add, “crossing into the territory of costume.”
Katrantzou also extended her repertoire in other ways. For the first
time, she focused on a single color top-to-toe, like the crayons on her
invitation. And she’d chosen deliberately banal subject matter to
match the colors. Green meant grass, for instance, rendered as an
ornamental lawn working its way down a floor-length gown. Yellow was
expressed in a mandala of No. 2 HB pencils, erasers attached.
They were
rendered in rubber by the Lesage embroidery atelier in Paris—not only
the first time Lesage’s artisans had worked with such stuff, but also
their first collaboration with a London designer. Clocks, hedges,
telephones, spoons, and forks also provided source material. The bodice
of a rococo red velvet dress featured a red typewriter, its keys
providing a coiling abstract geometry on the skirt.”
Katrantzou’s
conceits were so beautifully conceptualized—here never more so than
with the bathtub that foamed with crystals and pearls—that her
elevation of the quotidian to the sublime was, once again, easily one
of the finest pieces of theater in London fashion week.
This is the kind of collection with so much depth, richness and
invention, it’s virtually impossible to dissect it all, to discuss every
facet of its innovation, to articulate exactly how it felt to see
designer create something so mesmerising, so unique, and hands-down so
jaw-droppingly, unapologetically beautiful.
(photos:style.com)
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