Yesterday evening Alexander Wang won the 2009 edition of the Swiss Textiles Award.
I must admit that, after Rodarte’s won last year’s award and since Isabel Toledo was invited as special guest and jury member (Michelle Obama's by now iconic lemongrass Inauguration Day dress was made using guipure embroidery by the Swiss Forster Rohner company), I felt rather excited about the 2009 edition.
Yet the final results left me a bit cold. Wang has so far proved he has enough business acumen, showing he is able to come up with saleable and clever designs (sadly too often worn by a cohort of empty headed celebrities...) like his latest Spring/Summer 2010 collection in which he reinterpreted sport inspirations in a fresh way.
Wang doesn’t strike me though as a "textile based designer", in the sense that his work doesn’t display a massive research when it comes to fabrics.
Unfortunately the same may be said about many other "trendy" young and talented fashion designers, though it’s not necessarily their fault if they are not taught (at whatever respectable university or design course they chose to attend) to carry an in depth research into the importance of textiles nor encouraged to maybe do a few experiments with textile companies.
This year’s finalists included Erdem, Alexis Mabille, Ohne Titel, Peter Pilotto, Thakoon.
Now, the more I think about each of them, the more I see more textile ‘worthiness’ in them.
Erdem is known for using his dresses like canvases; Alexis Mabille, the French promise of the future of haute couture, seems to be among the very few young designers able to distinguish between broderie anglaise and guipure (as much as this may sound obvious...).
In just a couple of seasons, the Ohne Titel’s duo brought back on the New York runways interesting and modern decorative motifs with no banality nor frivolousness; Peter Pilotto’s designs are instead famous for their vibrant prints, colours and fabric treatments, while Thakoon’s designs wouldn’t probably have the same effect if they were made in less luxurious fabrics. Which leaves me wondering why Wang?
One answer could be that this award is more about what you will be able to do (as the Rodarte sisters proved,
illustrating their creative development since they won
the prize) with the Fashion Promotional Prize presented by the TVS Swiss Textile Federation worth 100,000 Euros, and less of a tribute for the way specific designers employed particular fabrics in their creations. So, who knows what Wang will do with his prize, hopefully, though, it will be something slightly more elaborate than the cropped tops and jogging trousers he is so famous for.
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