I'm continuing today the London Fashion Week thread I started a couple of days ago. I'm republishing another report - this time about Giles' show - taken from the selection I did for Russian magazine Look At Me (thanks to editor Julia Vydolob).
Stepping into the Royal Courts of Justice for Giles Deacon's show with a cryptic silver mask invite in our hands, quite a few of us expected to find a masked ball à la Charles de Beistegui. Surprisingly, though, we found a silver set, a crossover between Andy Warhol's 1966 Silver Flotations at the Leo Castelli Gallery and the photo-multipliers of the Super-Kamiokande.
Then, as the models started walking down the runway, it became clearer that swans were the main theme here. Now, the most banal reference could have been Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan, but there were more subtle elements to read into the designs.
Some of the main colours used for this collection - namely red, white, nude and black - called to mind the nuances of paintings such as Michelangelo's, portraying Leda and the Swan.
The predominat silver derived instead from an automaton – the 1773 Silver Swan – diplayed at the Bowes Museum. Though it was natural to wonder if, somehow, being a Schiaparelli fan, Giles was also thinking about Schiap's purple silk velvet dinner suit with Lesage metal embroidery and with a swan ornament at the waist.
Speculations were rife, but, after the first theatrical swan headdress by Stephen Jones matched with white tuxedos and a series of dresses, tops and trousers with swan prints, the emphasis on silver revealed that there was also another inspiration here.
Apparently, while creating the silver tunics, jackets and rigid laser cut dresses with innocent Peter Pan collars and pulled in waists that turned the models into beautiful automata, Giles also had on his mind Cecil Beaton's "Symphony in Silver" portrait of his sister Baba.
At the same time it must be highlighted that, while it is easy to try and spot all the most obscure references you want in a Giles collection, it is even easier to detect less arty and more pop references.
In this case the main palette for this collection could have come from the shades used on the main screen of the Kraftwerk Kling Klang Machine No 1 application on iPad (Giles is a fan), while the silver could be a reference to Barbarella's space suits (and the feathers and wings to Pygar...) with a touch of B-horror movie in those crimson shades.
After all there were some dichotomies in this collection, mainly between the ethereal beauty and softness of white and lilac feathers and the aggressiveness of the huge headdresses. Yet again, swans are elegant but, at times, also violent creatures and at the very end of the show this aspect was somehow emphasised by the models posing with their arms menacingly outstretched like wings.
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