The print season

Prints often change with the seasons: light floral motifs are often used in Spring, while Winter usually inspires less ethereal prints in warmer colours or darker shades.

The Spring/Summer 2010 season looks like a season of many different prints, from naïve to kaleidoscopically digital, from scary to perversely technological.

During Milan Fashion Week, Prada alternated precisely cut jackets and knee length trousers with frayed hems with silky dresses, shorts, jackets and trenches decorated with black and white prints of blossoming flowers or with photographic images of palms and beach scenes complete with holidaymakers relaxing under a sky characterised by nuclear shades.

Though tops overloaded with gems, crystal dresses that recalled Paco Rabanne iconic metal dresses, shoes with clear PVC inserts and Perspex heels and PVC bags completed this collection that looked well-executed though rather thin on ideas, most of the fashion critics approved of Miuccia Prada’s prints.

The designer presented another interpretation of prints for her Miu Miu collection during Paris Fashion Week.

In this case Miuccia Prada focused on naïve daisies, cat, dog and swallow prints that contrasted with images of a nude figure.

In some cases two or three different prints were used in the same design yet - thanks to the interesting cut of the clothes - the white cats on pink backgrounds or the yellow swallows printed on pink didn’t clash one with the other creating somehow unpleasant or ridiculous effects.

Shirts with long collars were indeed sliced around the chest area revealing the model's bare torso or a different print underneath, while dresses opened up into bra cut outs or print collars were matched with crystal embroidered or sequinned nude tops and dresses.

There was a dark yet funny inspiration in Giles Deacon's prints. 

Metallic green, pink, blue and yellow nuances prevailed in ballerina dresses, trousers and childish dinosaur shaped bags, but prints of venomous spiders on sheath and shirt dresses and spiders embroidered on grey tulle corseted dresses with a bright orange lining, looked darkly funny and luxurious.

A few seasons ago Basso & Brooke’s digital printed fabrics were among the very few ones at London Fashion Week.

Yet things change rather quickly nowadays and new designers such as Mary Katrantzou have been successfully experimenting with digital images.   

Basso & Brooke's Spring/Summer collection was entitled "New Pop" and basically mixed two main inspirations, Jeff Koons’ works and Herb Ritts’ photographs.

Ritts’ black and white tones balanced the design duo’s explosion of colours, creating interesting effects in a dress perfectly divided in a half by a lightning that broke the fabric in two parts, black on one side and pink/lilac/yellow on the other.

All the prints were perfectly executed on dresses characterised by modern body-con silhouettes, cut out motifs around the neck and beaded black and white swirls that merged into a fluid and colourful pleated skirt. Yet there was a major problem here: everything left you cold and gave you a sort of déjà vu sensation or was slightly pointless (is the dress with the names of fashion magazines just a captatio benevolentiae?).

Behind the bright oranges and blues, the vivid pinks and bursting yellows that formed wonderfully magic patterns, there didn’t seem to be the old irony that characterised the duo’s designs, but just the will to create vibrant and saleable prints, and, while there was an interesting research behind the designs also thanks to the innovative technologies that allowed the duo to explore the possibilities offered by new fabrics such as bespoke jacquards, there seemed to be no heart in the collection.

Alexander McQueen definitely won the main prize for digital prints and for the use of technology for the S/S 10 season.

Lady Gaga’s fans willing to listen to her new single debuting during the show crashed the premiere of the catwalk on Nick Knight's SHOWstudio.

Yet, though tragic, that was only a minor, almost irrelevant, accident in the presentation of McQueen’s "Plato’s Atlantis" collection.

For the next season, McQueen devised short couture-like dresses with intricate digital prints of reptile skins and deadly moths in green and brown shades or blue prints evoking ocean depths.

Prints and patterns were perfectly and evenly distributed on the bulbous skirted mini dresses, metallic sequins were used to build carapace-like structures and tailored coats were cut out in sinuous arcs to reveal blue prints.

The dress silhouettes evoked the idea behind the collection - the metamorphosis of human beings, and of women in particular, into sea animals, a concept reinforced by the prosthetic gills worn by the models.

McQueen created a dystopian vision of the future, but also came up with garments that went rather well with it since his prints, silhouettes and designs - including camouflage green jodhpur pants and dresses with disintegrating parts that gave the illusion of revealing the skin underneath - seemed indeed to mutate with McQueen’s women.

This vision of underwater future to which - according to McQueen - humanity is condemned to once the ice cap melts was reinforced by Nick Knight’s film of model Raquel Zimmerman metamorphosing from human to sea creature projected on the LED screen behind the models.

The catwalk show was Darwinian-ly and technologically scary yet truly theatrical and spectacular in its presentation, with two robot-cameras moving on rolling cranes along the runway.

There was something truly monstrous though in the catwalk, the footwear: some shoes looked like bizarre miss-shaped monsters others had metal plates applied along the heel; there were shoes entirely covered in gems or characterised by claw-shaped heels that, in some cases, looked like alien monsters or seemed to reproduce the movement of the waves.

The models seemed to have quite a few problems walking in the extreme footwear and the posture of quite a few of them was actually appalling as they clomped down the runway.

It will be interesting to see how - come next season - McQueen will turn his ideas (and prints) into wearable dresses and footwear.

For the time being, though, he remains the only designer who created for the next season a coherent collection based on a fantastically futuristic theme, presenting it in an engaging and thoroughly modern way. 

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