I'm continuing today the London Fashion Week thread I started yesterday with further reports taken from the selection I did for Russian magazine Look At Me (with many thanks to editor Julia Vydolob!).
Marios Schwab
Adopted from the Italian, the term “chiaroscuro” literally means “light-dark” and indicates the division of a single object into light and shade and their distribution over a composition.
The main power of chiaroscuro is to give substance to form and create space. Applied to fashion the term could produce different results, depending on the alteration, division and distribution of bright and dark masses.
Designer Marios Schwab used this term and this theme to play a game of hide and seek with the female body achieving what could be defined as the “Carlo Mollino balance”.
An eclectic Italian architect and designer, Mollino was known for the precise constructive principles of his works, but also for his magically surreal erotic images in which he altered the photos with a microscopic paintbrush to attain his ideal view of the female form (though there were also inspirations in this collection coming from other images and photographs by Herb Ritts).
Schwab did the same, suspending his designs between rigorous forms and fluid sensuality.
Perforated sleeveless dresses in black, white and nude prevailed in the collection presented in a minimalist setting at Somerset House's BFC show space.
Fabric and net inserts alternated in the same design forming precisely cut geometric motifs that turned the exposed skin into a part of the design.
As the show progressed, the chiaroscuro theme turned into sheer blouses and dresses in which sheer black fabric formed an impalpable veil over solid white or orange shades.
The final billowing evening gowns in sheer black fabric covering a Swarovski sprinkled bustier added the proper degree of sensuality to the collection.
Christopher Kane
The battle for the star-studded front row started early on Monday morning when British Fashion Council ambassadress and wife of Prime Minister Samantha Cameron went to see Peter Pilotto's show.
Yet celebrity-spotting at Christopher Kane's show (attended also by Erin O'Connor and Kanye West) became a secondary sport.
The big news were indeed not the celebrities, but the final joyful reactions of the enthusiastic audience.
Kane is beginning to perfectly master the Gianni Versace trick of turning the kitsch into the chic.
The Scottish-born London-based designer is well known for moving from the most unlikely themes, turning them around and creating through them highly desirable and saleable clothes.
This time it was the bedrooms of council-estate girls with paper peeling off the walls and stickers on wardrobes that inspired Kane.
Now, if you are somehow familiar with Newarthill, where the designer was born, or with the nearby Motherwell, you will know pretty well how grim the places where such an inspiration was borrowed may be, yet the collection didn't seem to bear any signs of gloomy bleakness.
The show opened instead with brocade jackets, skirts and dresses in metallic shades (perfectly matching with the chrome-lined set of venue with its view of London’s skyscraper buildings) that peeled away (that's where the wallpaper inspiration entered…) to reveal mint green and yellow tones.
In some cases the fabric was folded creating origami-like motifs, while sheer organza inserts covered the slits cut across elbows and ribs.
A sporty edge was added via rubber-soled pool sandals and deep-arm cricket jumpers matched with mini-skirts with prints of roses that looked as if they had been lifted from a young girl's scrapbook or secret diary (the prismatic halo around the flowers was probably the hint to track down the inspiration…).
Then came another kitsch-meets-craft trick: last season Kane created liquid-filled plastic details that called to mind iconic pencil cases from the '80s, but for the next Spring/Summer he opted for digitally reworked bright coloured Perspex cut out flowers that looked like cheap vintage floral decals trapped in dove grey or white impalpable aluminum organza layers.
The same theme was repeated on the clutch bags before the story changed once again and a pair of frayed bejewelled denims (a reference to Kane's collaboration with J Brand) introduced the final densely encrusted dresses, jackets and mini-skirts (somehow reminiscent of Versace's opulent designs from the early 90s) all matched with sparkling flat sandals again on rubber soles.
“Sporty chic”, somebody stated at the very end, while editors were already talking about “sport-couture”, and, while such an oxymoronic term may sound far-fetched, it could be the best definition being also perfectly timed with the 2012 London Olympic Games.
Mary Katrantzou
Members of the audience clutching cups of coffee at the first catwalk show of the day – Mary Katrantzou's – actually managed to wake themselves up without even sipping their drinks as soon as the first model walked around the bed of carnations in neat rows of yellow, fuchsia and red at the centre of the Topshop Venue.
Katrantzou's signature vibrant prints in bright saturated shades inspired by mechanical parts, crashed Cadillacs (a theme inspired by John Chamberlain's manipulations of crushed car parts, but somehow reminiscent of Hussein Chalayan's S/S 09 collection 'Inertia') and flowers, easily managed to capture the attention of the fashion media on the morning of the last day of the London women’s Spring/Summer 2012 season.
At times the industrial prevailed over the natural, at others nature bloomed in more optimistic ways covering dresses, jackets and suits in shades – yellow, red and blue – imitating the colours of the carnations decorating the catwalk set.
Another theme was introduced towards the end of the show, the sea, with underwater images, coral reefs, shells and shoals of fish swimming in the pure blue of the Pacific Ocean.
Though the silhouettes for most of the dresses in the collection were mainly slender and controlled, the sea theme, matched with a print of piled up and squashed aluminum cans, was applied to puff skirt dresses reminiscent of some of Katrantzou's trademark shapes from previous collections.
In fact it's exactly the silhouettes that are Katrantzou's limitation.
The designer attempted some variations with dresses that included collage-like panels of different fabrics and chainmail sleeves and with intarsia knits, but the shapes stayed more or less the same.
Katrantzou lives indeed in her own digital world which is as bright as the Land of Oz in Victor Fleming's film and while she has learnt to master the print trick making specific images - including the perfumes, vases of flowers and images of living rooms from her previous collections – fall on specific parts of the body with excellent results, her collections display weak points when it comes to the tailoring (you can always expect at some point a cocktail dress with a rigidly precise sculpted shape and a piece of chiffon trailing behind…).
The final showpiece, an asymmetric dress covered in metallic tin can-like elements, metal flowers and sequins (a design that had all the iPhones going up in the air at the same time…) confirmed though that, while London may still be up for fantastically crazy designs, it has reached enough credibility and is able to stand up to the level of the other fashion weeks.
And in the global financial downturn and with the EU debt crisis, that's definitely a remarkable achievement.
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