When we talk about textile design we immediately think about decorative patterns, prints and colours. Yet the history of fashion also presents us with more advanced textile products, created using new technologies and often employing chemical or artificial fibres.
In 1968, for example, Pierre Cardin invented a synthetic fabric dubbed "Cardine" that featured a three-dimensional pattern.
The fabric made with heat-moulded bonded Dynel (a copolymer of acrylonitrile and vinyl chloride and the trade name for a type of synthetic material used in fiber reinforced plastic composite materials, especially for marine applications) that could be pre-shaped or sewn to couture standards.
Cardin used the fabric for uncrushable pre-formed dresses incorporating decorative three-dimensional geometric patterns that had a good tensile strength.
The effects of Cardin's Cardine designs was mimicked in some of the creations in Marco de Vincenzo's S/S 20 collection, showcased last Friday during Milan Fashion Week.
For the occasion De Vincenzo left the usual indoor venues and moved his runway in the open air to Milan's Darsena on the banks of the Naviglio Grande.
While in the past the designer usually combined a lot of colours and patterns in the same design, for the S/S 20 season he decided to accept a new and refreshing challenge and focused on monochromatic looks.
He came up with 47 models, each of them sporting one colour (and no colour was alike), starting from black and finishing off with bright pink.
The different colours were a way for de Vincenzo to reference multiculturalism, diversity and inclusivity, and remind the audience that fashion is for everybody.
Having reduced his colours, de Vincenzo therefore reshifted his attention on elaborate textures: he pleated, folded, twisted, embossed and created origami with silk cady.
He then used these fabrics with embossed surfaces for jackets, cropped tops and midi skirts. Strapless tops were sculpted with ripples, and there were also laser-cut holes on light dresses and a trellis-like tulle construction punctuated by tiny roses or swirls overimposed on a prismatic sequin dress.
Some of the models also carried an ice cream cone to show a connection between the texture and colour of the ice cream and of their outfits.
Material transformations at times didn't work, especially in those cases in which de Vincenzo seemed to evoke silhouettes from past Chanel's collections (by Karl Lagerfeld) or in the designs that closed the collection that were a bit bulky and unflattering, while the knitwear offer provided variation and was consistent.
The final effects de Vincenzo created called to mind the experiments carried out in the late '70s by the Abet company that produced the first three-dimensional laminate, Reli-tech, characterised by interesting modern patterns and a three-dimensional effect that added a tactile quality to the material.
The three-dimensional motifs in de Vincenzo's collection may have actually been taken from architecture or interior design, after all they seemed to point at the patterns featured in the Decorattivo yearly compendiums of graphic information (or maybe we're reading too much into this collection and de Vincenzo was just fascinated by the texture of a soft swirl ice cream…).
Somehow it didn't care where the geometrical patterns came from as the most relevant point was that the decorative surface elements provided de Vincenzo with a new infinite dimension to explore as the smallest motifs replicated on the design contained the total information carried by the system as a whole.
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