Clowning Around: Tsumori Chisato A/W 2010

I already explored the circus theme in previous posts connected with specific fashion collections.

In a way, this is an obvious theme since it provides fashion designers with virtually endless possibilities and a chance to play with colours, shapes, silhouettes and embellishments, borrowing from the costumes of the different performers.

I’ve often felt that Tsumori Chisato’s designs echo a sort of playful circus-like theatricality.

The Japanese designer who started working in the late 70s for Issey Miyake and launched in 1990 her own line, is well known for incorporating in her collections vivid colours, bold stripes and clashing prints.

The circus theme was somehow evident in previous collections such as Chisato’s A/W 2009 with its starry prints, oversized jackets and jodhpurs evoking clown costumes.

Yet there were hints at clowns and circus performers also in the Autumn 2010 collection recently presented during Paris Fashion Week.

Black and white striped bouffant pants and skirts called to mind classic Pierrot costumes; purple capes with black frogging were ideal for a rather dark circus ringleader while trompe l’oeil and appliquéd curtain ropes and tassels were employed to embellish evening gowns.

One design featured prints of streamers and confetti that recalled the final scenes of Fellini’s The Clowns in which the camera moves around the empty circus tent filming the streamers hanging from its roof (see video at the end of this post, around 0:37).

As the circus moved to the Orient, clowns were transported to a land of fairy tales and Arabian Nights populated by models in veiled hats clad in camel driver-style brown capes with red pockets, wearing dresses with the head of an animal surrealistically peaking out among the vividly coloured prints or sporting jumpers with intarsia motifs of golden Aladdin lamps.

Chisato's work can usually be compared to a veritable tour de force in chaotic prints, but I guess that, if this collection were a film, it could only be for its atmospheres, colours and themes, The Clowns.

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