It can be difficult to find the perfect location for a catwalk show nowadays as new collections are presented in the most incredible spaces - from the streets to museums, from architectural institutions to department stores and clubs. Yet, if you have your own fashion exhibition celebrating your career, art and passions, things may be a bit easier. This was the case with Antonio Marras, who has currently got his own personal expo at Milan's Triennale design museum.
The dilemma about fashion being art has always been around, but in this case, rather than trying to reconcile things and find definitive answers to difficult questions, Marras decided to use the place as a stage, a set to make random connections between fashion, art, theatre and literature, putting up a creative performance to showcase his Antonio Marras and I'm Isola Marras men's and women's Pre-Fall collections.
Clothes were used as costumes to create vignettes about different stages in human life – birth, love, war, madness and so on – represented by models, actors, dancers and performers. Rather than a traditional runway this was a maze of different tableaux vivants with their own stories and ideas.
A Scottish mood hung in the air: dancers in kilts welcomed guests at the entrance and some sections of the space evoked a haunted castle in the Scottish Highlands. But there were also surreal love scenes with a man and a woman standing in front of an incubator containing a sketchbook rather than a baby (symbolising the birth of creation?), 1940s refined ladies, women reclining on tables covered in piles of marshmallows or denture shaped candies, childish damsels playing blind man's buff, men with toy rifles covered in fabric and a bearded woman engulfed in a monumental gown frantically knitting while reciting a poem.
One tableau was particularly convincing, it featured two men that called to mind dodgy characters like the cat and the fox out of Pinocchio, standing outside a classroom (a classic Marras trope), with several soft animal students, but also a couple of models, one of them was clutching a massive soft toy and wearing a fabric donkey hat.
Though the final messages were poetically impalpable, hopelessly romantic and childishly naïve (but Marras is partial to such things…) they didn't overshadow the clothes.
Some of them were covered in rich and lavish embroideries, floral appliquéd motifs (and floral patterns on military uniforms), fur details, patchworks, intarsia, tapestries, animal prints, and brocades. Tartans and plaids pointed back to the Scottish influence, and the main palette for the collection featured sensible shades such as autumnal greens and browns. There were over-the-top moments, but the vintage moods created desirable and timeless coats, parkas and peacoats.
In a way the decorative elements on the clothes mirrored the designer's personal obsessions with paintings, drawings and sketches, on display at La Triennale as part of the event "Antonio Marras: Nulla Dies Sine Linea" (meaning "Not One Day Without a Line", a reference to the fact that he doesn't seem to be able to ever stop creating, something interviewers often witness when sitting in front of Marras who usually answers questions while doodling or sketching on anything he finds around him).
The result was at times a sensory overload, but it was part of the experimental edge Milan displayed that may point towards a different interpretation of fashion, maybe less commercial, but surely more poetical.
Related articles
Rispondi