Proenza Schouler’s Fashion Renaissance

The main idea behind Proenza Schouler’s presentation at Pitti_W Woman was creating “an untraditional approach” in the words of designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, mixing art, fashion and music and bringing a slice of Americana to Europe.

Expectations were high and they were absolutely fulfilled yesterday night at the Villa della Petraia. It was the first time this impressive 16th century Medicean villa designed by Bernardo Buontalenti and decorated with frescoes by Volterrano and Cosimo Daddi, was used for such a special event. Villa della Petraia, located outside Florence and surrounded by green hills, was literally taken by storm by Proenza Schouler.

After entering the main door, visitors were greeted by an installation by Haim Steinbach that featured Proenza Schouler’s pre-Spring accessories presented in neat rows on a white carpet, alternated to dog toys and a bed frame. The huge chandelier and the painted walls of the room contrasted with the starkness of the installation with shoes and small objects that almost called to mind game pieces on a board.   

On the villa terrace photography was instead mixed with visual art: two screens mounted on the villa back façade projected music videos by Kalup Linzy featuring actress Chloe Sevigny and model Liya Kebede, while a photographic series presented a selection of Proenza Schouler pre-Spring 2010 collection. Themes such as gender, race and class were tackled in the videos, while the ironic poses in the photographs echoed Renaissance paintings. Kebede posed like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and St. John the Baptist, while the colours of the outfits from the pre-collection evoked in some cases the nuances of Renaissance paintings, though there were just very few images to get an overall impression of the collection.   

Performance artist Kembra Pfahler, lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, closed the evening with a deadly fierce performance. Inspired by the philosophy of “availabilism”, that is using what’s readily available, Pfahler recruited a small army of girls from the dance academy of Florence. The girls, their bodies painted in black, wearing a red and white stripy body suit by Proenza Schouler and a white ribbon in their massive wigs, recreated the chorus configuration in William A. Seiter’s film “Roberta”.

Accompanied by DJ Spencer Sweeney dressed like a Satanic nun and theremin player Armen Ra – undoubtedly one of the best players of this instrument in the world as his fingers gently and effortlessly fluctuating in the air proved – Pfhaler, her body painted in shocking pink and wearing a Proenza Schouler black corset, sang tracks such as the heavy metal “Tarantula”, danced and bared her bottom. Looking like a crossover between Fellini’s Saraghina, a plastic sex doll and a dominatrix, Pfhaler awarded the girls at the end of the show not with Oscars but with souvenir Statues of Liberty coated in black paint. 

You could argue that there wasn’t much about fashion at Proenza Schouler’s event, but the duo seems to have understood that fashion is not just about clothes: it’s a mish-mash of different passions and obsessions and, in our times, it needs to be shaken from its roots and entirely reinvented to provoke new desires and emotions.