You honestly wonder why a designer who knows how to cut trousers (and that's no mere feat in today's confusing fashion industry) has got to embarrass himself by creating something that could be defined as completely and unnecessarily useless.
Having included in his Autumn/Winter 2014 collection wool coats with fur-trimmed sleeves, high-waisted trousers and sharp suits in a palette comprising wine and dove grey (plus plenty of his trademark lingerie-like looks), Francesco Scognamiglio decided to ruin more or less everything with horrid full-torso corsets with sculpturally detailed breasts.
Though he claimed he had designed them with an engineer, the corsets - in flesh tones, ice grey or in a bright orangey red - were too high, starting from under the chin and extending to the hips. In some cases they looked extremely tight, objectifying the models and giving their bodies the uncanny impression of being made of plastic; in other cases they looked unfitting and featureless especially when matched with well-cut suits.
Sculpted corsets appeared quite a few times throughout the history of fashion - think about Issey Miyake's 1981 breastplate or Thierry Mugler's sensually robotic or transparent corsets.
The most famous sculpted bustiers were created by Claude Lalanne for Yves Saint Laurent's Haute Couture A/W 1969 collection.
In Lalanne's case the sculptures were plaster molds of Veruschka's breasts, torso and belly covered in galvanized copper and incorporated then in two dresses, one in blue and and the other in black crepe voile.
Scognamiglio's seemed to be referencing other types of corsets, though, like the ones integrated in the dresses in Hussein Chalayan's Autumn/Winter 2009 collection ("Earthbound") or the pieces seen in Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 1996 ("The Hunger") and S/S 1999 collections.
As some of you may remember McQueen sent out on his S/S 1996 runway a model with a transparent neck-to-hips bustier in which he sandwiched live worms, trying to make a comment about horror, disgust, fashion and sensuality; in his S/S 1999 collection, there was instead a moulded leather body corset matched with wooden prosthetic legs, an ensemble that hinted at the organic/inorganic real/artificial dichotomies.
Though you don't have to justify everything you put in a collection, Scognamiglio didn't even try to give his corsets a conceptual meaning or a reason to exist, they indeed seemed to be there for no purpose at all or maybe they were created with the secret hope that some obnoxious celebrity/pop star will wear them.
Here we have a mild case of plagiarism compared to yesterday's, but it's still rather interesting especially because it regards a completely unnecessary piece that didn't add anything to the collection as a whole. Yes, fashion is first and foremost frivolously unnecessary, but it must be "desirably unnecessary" and, most women will find it hard desiring to be encased in a (plagiarised) plastic-looking body trap.
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