Among the orgy of collections that have been seen rather than properly analysed or reviewed (the review, as predicted in a previous post, is the first casualty of the See-Now-Buy-Now trend…) during New York Fashion Week there is a micro-trend that has arisen and that may become bigger as the fashion weeks continue throughout the month – painterly patterns.
Tomas Maier interpreted the idea in a timeless way, via simple lightweight canvas-like white cotton dresses with a coloured hand-painted line along the edges. The pieces looked elegant yet incredibly functional.
The trend also emerged in sporty and casual designs at Lacoste: though the core of the collection still revolved around athletic pieces, Felipe Oliveira Baptista gave them a much-needed urban twist and included a dress and a tracksuit in which a printed pattern of paint looked as if it were literally gushing and dripping from the fabric.
Interestingly enough, the inspiration for some of the other pieces in the rest of the collection was architectural and came – at least for what regarded the dusty and sunburnt palette of some of the designs – from a fictional tennis match on the rooftop of the modernist Casa Malaparte (designed by Adalberto Libera, even though letters and documents prove the project can be entirely attributed to Curzio Malaparte himself) in Capri, a masterpiece of modern architecture.
At times the washed brown and beige tones evoked the shades of Marcello Mastroianni's suits in Liliana Cavani's La pelle (shot at Villa Malaparte); at others, especially in a dress in Lacoste trademark piqué cotton with thin stripes, the designer seemed to be creating an abstract version of the iconic staircase of the villa as seen from afar in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris.
In the latter the main characters do not seem to be able to reconcile themselves with the nature surrounding them and are destined to become victims of the times they are living in, while the villa turns into a symbol of the integration between different dichotomies such as the natural and the artificial or the modern and the classic.
If only fashion could do the same and reconcile its artificial frantic rhythms with nature rather than focusing only on the most commercial aspects of the industry, we would maybe have fewer collections, less crazy fashion weeks and, well, better clothes.
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