Looking for interesting and cleverly carried out inspirations in today’s fashion collections can be rather difficult; finding them in that affair of impressively bulimic proportions that has become New York Fashion Week is usualy tricky and often almost impossible.
Yet, every now and then, you see sparks of hope and good intuitions appearing here and there, this was the case for example with Victoria Bartlett’s VPL collection.
The designer moved from the world of dance, but – gratefully – not strictly from ballet.
Fashion used and abused ballet for ages, with collections that often included tutu-like dresses, ballet slippers and pale pink sweater wraps, directly borrowed from the wardrobe of a ballerina.
Bartlett went another way instead, moving from the punkish side of dance and in particular from Michael Clark’s "Modern Masterpiece", retitled in later years "Mmm".
A very physical piece that moved from Stravinsky's controversial The Rite of Spring and also included accompaniment from the Sex Pistols and Public Image, Mmm was first staged in 1992 in a depot behind London's King's Cross station with a cast that comprised Clark himself, Julie Hood, Matthew Hawkins, Joanne Barrett and Bessie Clark and with costumes by Leigh Bowery.
The show was divided in different parts and at times had a sort of pastiche-like structure, two aspects that Bartlett somehow managed to include in her collection.
Mainly based on neutrals, such as nude, white, gray and black with some splashes of ochre here and there, the collection started with garments characterised by draped motifs and in shiny fabrics contrasting with matte ones that, wrapping and twisting around the body, created movement while successfully calling to mind the episodic nature of the show, the different choreographies and clashes of music.
The knits that closed the show - including boleros, tops, shorts and body pieces - didn’t inject into the collection any grotesque elements à la Bowery, but seemed to be with their armour-like elements, skirts that turned not into tutus but into rigid and tortuous architectural structures, oversized ribbed or braided shoulder areas and intricate motifs that in some places were reduced to a single thread, a reference to Clark’s trademark distrust of conventional beauty and to his distorted and absurd aesthetic.
While these destructured knitted pieces may have been references to Joanne Barrett’s intricate movements as she danced on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Clark's "Mmm", they were more probably an indirect tribute to Bodymap's innovative designs with holes in unexpected places or with fabric revealing specific areas of the body (remember the dancers in Clark's 1986 "No Fire Escape in Hell" in their buttock-baring unitard?).
I’m going to leave you with two clips for further inspirations.
The first one relates to another Michael Clark choreography this time on The Fall's 'Ludd Gang' and fits in with the polka dot trend that arrived in London after Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition opened at the Tate Modern.
The second one is a nostalgic memento of when Italian TV was extremely intelligent (so intelligent in fact they had to destroy it...) and it's a clip of Michael Clark himself dancing on T-Rex’s "Cosmic Dancer" on Italian State TV channel RaiUno (the woman you see for a fraction of a second at the beginning of the clip is Italian dance critic Vittoria Ottolenghi, who used to present a very popular daily - note daily! - dance programme in the '80s).
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