“I would get married in that.”
“In black?”
“Why not? Black is a stylish colour and it could be a symbol of…” I start a long and convoluted explanation about why I find black as the perfect colour for a wedding dress while Osman Yousefzada is putting the final touches to a little black dress (LBD) from his Spring/Summer 07 collection. The dress is short, the front looks tight, but its chiffon back is loose and it contributes to give the dress a cape or cocoon-like shape. It’s a very simple and minimalist, though very distinctive, piece, the sort of dress that would make you look slim and stylish and would never go out of fashion.
As
he irons out the folds in front of the mirror and studies the silhouette to give it a bit more volume, Yousefzada explains me that this is one of the four LBDs chosen to be exhibited at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum's “Little Black Dress”, an event celebrating this icon of style from the 1920s to the present day. Yousefzada seems to have become a master in the art of the LBD. Just a few months ago he made a capsule collection of 10 LBDs for high-street chain Mango that was very successful. Fast-forward to today and four of his black creations are part of a museum exhibition.
I meet Yousefzada on a warm June afternoon in London. It’s past 6 p.m., Oxford Street - which is basically around the corner from Yousefzada's studio - is still swarming with people. As his staff leave, the place turns quieter.
In the studio window there are a few pieces from his S/S 08 “Tribal-Bauhaus” collection and a bronze wire bustier inspired by Burmese tribal wear. Inside, there are more samples from the same collection: black dresses with draped fabric at the back; short jackets; cropped trousers and skirts with scarves and apron details. Draping and wrapping seem to be the key words to unravel the secrets behind Yousefzada's work.
The drapes are used to flatter the body, Yousefzada explains, hiding those bits of our bodies - such as the stomach - we might not be too happy about. “I think it’s important for a dress to do some plastic surgery to your body, to pull you in all the right places,” he says. “My aesthetics is very plain, quite minimal, architectural, but the cut is really complicated. I try to eliminate lines and wrap stuff around the body to make my creations clean.” Yousefzada's white shirts are also a very good example of this "cleanliness" he is talking about:
they are so precisely cut that they could rival those created by the master of
women’s white shirts, the late Italian designer Gianfranco Ferrè.
Chaos reigns downstairs: the place looks exactly like you would expect a designer's studio to be, with Yousefzada’s desk cluttered with fashion and design books, his wall covered in cut outs from newspapers and magazines, some of them, such as the one portraying a matador facing a bull, used as inspirations for his collections. In a corner there are stacked rolls of different fabrics, “My brick and mortar”, he says.
I leaf through one of his catalogues from his A/W 2008-09 collection. It’s richer compared to this season’s. Many of the inspirations for this collection came from a trip to Japan during which the young designer visited many Buddhist temples, “Some of them used to be quite colourful, like the Roman temples, but their oranges and reds and golds came off as time passed.” This inspiration was fused with matador outfits, while the motifs on the clothes is inspired by monastic prayer books, so that the creations have a luxurious and romantic feeling about them.
As I leaf through the catalogue, Yousefzada reveals me that there are some pieces he doesn’t like anymore. To me the structured tailoring of the dress shapes and their palettes of blues and nudes seem flawless. But I guess if you’re a young designer with a constant desire to evolve and make better things, looking at your work with a critical eye is something you often do. In future, Yousefzada anticipates, he would like to do also a menswear collection, but at the moment he lacks the financial support to do it. But, he warns, there’s still plenty of time for him. ”I want to go quite slowly and naturally into my business," he tells me, "and create things that can stand the test of time and that can look quite modern in 10-15 years’ time." Judging from his LBDs he has already created quite a few iconic pieces.
The Fashion and Textile Museum’s "Little Black Dress" exhibition runs from 19 June 2008 to 25 August 2008.
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