Having abandoned for a while the architectural thread, I feel this is the right time to go back to it by focusing on Pedro Lourenço’s Autumn/Winter 2010-11 collection.
If you know your fashion history and follow the international scene, you will easily have connected in your mind the young designer with two well-known Brazilian names, Reinaldo Lourenço and Glória Coelho, his parents.
Despite being only 19, Lourenço boasts an impeccable curriculum: after creating his first collection when he was only 12 years old for his mother’s second line, Carlota Joakina, he later on started showcasing his designs under his own name at São Paulo Fashion Week.
You could argue that the young designer definitely comes from a privileged background, yet he definitely used the experience and expertise his parents offered him to create his own style and build his business, while developing an interesting research into materials, structures and techniques.
Spending time with his parents visiting factories and manufacturing plants helped him getting an insight into the real fashion industry that is often obliterated by the glitter and glamour of fashion shows and celebrity events.
This is why the designs he presented in Paris – part of his first commercial collection – showed an interesting maturity.
For this collection Lourenço mainly focused on future – a topic I will explore in the next post – and architecture.
The rigidity of some of his creations called to mind robotic forms, but his designs displayed also the influence of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.
Yet, while the architect was involved in projects that contributed to help the government shaping the ‘novo homem, Brasileiro e moderno’ (new man, Brazilian and modern), Lourenço’s main aim is to create a wardrobe for a modern, strong and international woman.
Moving from Niemeyer’s buildings, characterised by modernist, dynamic and sensual shapes, silhouettes and curves, Lourenço came up with well-sculpted leather dresses.
His palette comprised black, acid green and a dusty nude that called to mind the colour of Brasília’s earth staining Jean-Paul Belmondo's suit in Philippe de Broca’s 1964 spy spoof film L’homme de Rio (That Man from Rio – check video at the end of this post, that features images of Oscar Niemeyer's nascent Brasília).
Borrowing the adjustable brises-soleil of Corbusian memory, Lourenço reinterpreted them as horizontal plastic vents and integrated them in his dresses, while also adding further industrial details like studs and zippers.
Architecture also means experimenting with different materials and that’s exactly what the young designer did by employing in an interestingly rational and reasonable way triangle-shaped plastic elements to decorate his post-modernist kilts.
The result wasn’t extravagantly unwearable, but retained the grace and elegance, lightness and fluidity of the best and most famous buildings created by Niemeyer.
Time will tell if Lourenço is truly a rising star of the fashion scene, but, for this collection, he seems to have nailed well his inspirations, thanks to a modern aesthetic based on contrasts between fluidity and austerity, different materials and inventive forms.
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