Sometimes, the more I look at fashion collections, the more I think that everything has already been done; everything is indeed just being reinvented in an endless and vicious circle.
Too often in the discovery of greater expressive possibilities, fashion designers end up representing ideas that only look superficially new, concepts that seem wonderfully marvellous to an uneducated eye, but display strong connections with precise previous collections or with experiments carried out by art movements and artists quite a few decades ago. Let’s take as an example Walter Van Beirendonck’s Spring/Summer 2012 collection.
The sleeveless jackets and tops in Van Beirendonck’s colourful collection – mainly characterised by an alternation of pastel and bright colours in which polka dot prints, acid lemon shades, aqua green and orange prevailed – were indeed paired with long gloves in which triangles of colours formed the distinctive features of a face or waves of bright shades created dynamic movements.
It's somehow almost too easy to detect in the gloves a sort of derivation from the Italian Futurists and in particular from Fortunato Depero’s experimental clothes such as his kaleidoscopic waistcoats (View this photo), his pieces of furniture and other furnishing objects.
In a way the triangles used to trace the figures in the gloves also call to mind Giacomo Balla’s abstract landscapes of geometric figures (while the palette for this collection also seems to be lifted from paintings such as "Compenetrazioni iridescenti", "Paesaggio" and "Genio Futurista"), experiments in repeated colours on structures of triangular forms.
Some critics state that Balla came up with these works re-elaborating the theories of philosopher and mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert combined with Étienne Jules-Marey’s chrono-photographs.
In 1772 Johann Heinrich Lambert tried to explain the relationship between colours using the "Farbenpyramide", a pyramid divided in seven sections gradually increasing in brightness, from black to white, that he created for textile merchants, dyers and printers.
Balla applied the colours and abstract lines of his painting Compenetrazioni iridescenti to his ties.
But Balla's combination of colours also seems to be the main inspiration behind some of Walter Van Beirendonck’s designs, including his bow ties and shoes (though his fluffy dresses, jackets and tops in organza ruffles borrow more from the Surrealists than from the Futurists...), two references that call to mind Louis Corpechot’s description of the Italian Futurist "Balla wears a Futurist tie, a green and yellow knot that has the form of the propeller of an airplane, Futurist white and yellow shoes...”
Bright and joyful colours may be the future of menswear for the Spring/Summer 2012 season, yet that doesn't sound surprising. Indeed, as Balla stated in an interview: “Modern man leans towards colour. This is shown by Parisian trends. The hats, the parasols, the clothes of our ladies and the handkerchiefs and ties that we wear. And what has Futurist painting actually been from its beginning to today if not a search for abstract chromatic decorativism? And this is because our art is essentially decorative, and today we orientate ourselves towards art applied to industry. This form of art moves us a lot closer to the masses and can be understood and felt by all.”
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