As you may have heard, porcelain German manufacturer Meissen will debut in fashion during Milan Fashion Week launching a collection of 17 cocktail dresses, wedding dresses and luxury accessories comprising bags, scarves and ties. Apparently, the collection directly moves from the shapes and traditional decorations of the company's archive. Yet, the Spring/Summer 2014 season may see further links between porcelain and fashion.
In Meissen's case we have a porcelain producer that turns to fashion, while Peter Pilotto moved in their new collection from American ceramic artist and printmaker Ken Price, currently celebrated by a sculpture retrospective at the Met Museum in New York (until 22nd September).
Since the '60s, Price has been creating brightly coloured abstract (and at times grotesque) bulbous and fluid fired clay sculptures, characterised by surfaces painted in acrylic colours that display striking combinations of different shades. Price's merit stands in having reached a sort of balance between form and surface.
Peter Pilotto and Christopher De Vos's main aim seemed to be the same as Price, but in their case they tried to reach a balance texture-wise, to avoid letting their prints taking over.
Pilotto and De Vos replaced or blended prints with layers of lace, broke architectural images with glitches or replicated them with beads creating perspectives with interesting visual depths.
Price achieves his hues and shades by sanding down the mutiple layers of acrylic paint in different colours that end up producing crazy patterns. His colours are a continuum of perceptions: combinations of metallic blues, yellows, greens, reds and pinks, shimmery surfaces that may be difficult to reproduce in fashion since fabric is a static material (unless you employ iridescent textiles that may give a design a sense of dynamic movement).
By layering lace with pale green, chartreuse, azure and lava orange prints (that called to mind Price's ceramic pieces, but also his drawings) Pilotto and De Vos offered a new chromatic experience. The designers applied this technique to two-piece dresses, layered jackets and crinoline skirts.
Fashion critics enthused about the latter, but using crinoline (at times visible through the transparent fabric) was almost an easy way out: the real talent would have been finding an alternative way to give shape and support to those skirts without using a separate structure underneath. Indeed, modern fashion is about taking away rather than adding (and talking about taking away, also the half ruffles on skirts may have been avoided in some cases...).
It remains to be seen if Price will also inspire the line of womenswear, swimwear and accessories that Peter Pilotto and Christopher De Vos will design for American retailer Target in February 2014.
For the time being, it's good to know that the design duo managed to avoid falling into the lure of the digital print, though they were a bit too repetitive when it came to silhouettes and shapes - a problem they share with other young designers that usually showcase their collections at London Fashion Week.
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