Pixellated, pleated and online: Viktor & Rolf S/S 09

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Despite fashion is an everyday obsession for each of us, even for those who claim they don’t follow it (after all we all have to get dressed…), it’s also a rather cruel and disgustingly elitist business. In the same way, fashion weeks are great fun, they can be amazing spectacles of glamour and money, but they can also bring the worst out of editors, journalists, PRs, celebrities and such likes. What you wear and where you sit sadly end up being more important than your own life during catwalk shows. After all, these are the things that prove how fashionable and powerful you are.

You can imagine then that after Viktor & Rolf decided not to present their Spring/Summer 09 collection during a conventional catwalk, but put their show online on their website for the whole world to watch, they gave passionate fans and fashion bloggers great amounts of joy and left all the first-row vampires upset. Maybe those who criticised this choice missed their front row seat and their goodie bag more than anything else, since the camera zooming on the various outfits and accessories perfectly allowed you to see them better than if you were sitting in the front row.

The most hypocritical ones though never admitted that losing their seat to an online show really pissed them off, they just limited to say that the collection featured only 21 outfits. Yet, that’s a reasonable number for the designers who, throughout their career, fought against the concept of fast fashion and made manifest their dislike of the “quantity over quality” dogma.

The name of the collection, “Funny Face”, was reminiscent of Stanley Donen’s eponymous film starring Audrey Hepburn as the bookshop assistant who turns model, and Fred Astaire as fashion photographer. The pink colours of the first few minutes of the movie seemed to pop in the Swarovski crystals bandeau dresses with organza pleats à la Capucci, while Hepburn’s exuberant spirit was encapsulated by the smiling muse of the Dutch design duo, Shalom Harlow, chosen as the only model of the whole show.

Thanks to the close-ups it was easy to see the details of the cute pixellated white T-shirt with a multi-coloured dragon, the black and white optical art designs à la Victor Vasarely printed on dresses, skirts and thighs that extended also onto shoes; the deflated volumes of the black coats and blouses and of the yellow, orange and red dresses, all completed by rich jewels. The ruffle on the last silver and gold dress looked a bit like an ammonite fossil, an ancient shell that, like Capucci’s dresses, was designed not to imprison the body of the wearer, but to built a glamorous habitat around it.

The final image of the catwalk with clones of Shalom Harlow clapping along the catwalk and a giant image of the designers popping up from behind the stage, brought everything back to a theme the designers often explored in their career and, most recently, during their Barbican exhibition, the doll house. In this case though they looked more like the puppet masters of their very special digital theatre, keen on playing jokes on the cruel fashion elites and on the relentless and, often rather silly, world of fashion.