Trends come and go, but it looks like creating costumes for the opera is one of those obsessions that is here to stay. The latest fashion designer to jump on the opera bandwagon has been Hussein Chalayan who designed the costumes for "Così Fan Tutte", that opened in May at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
The costumes for this opera - with music performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, music direction by Gustavo Dudamel and stage direction by Christopher Alden - included draped column gowns and transformative garments that hid underneath colourful creations in laser cut three-dimensional fabric custom-made for this production.
While being derivations of Chalayan's designs from his A/W 2013 and S/S 2014 collections, the transformative costumes suspended between art and architecture went pretty well with this hybrid opera which is part drama and part comedy and that features characters - Fernando and Guglielmo and their fiancées Fiordiligli and Dorabella - that change as the story develops.
Classical and experimental combined in Chalayan's costumes, but also in the 14-foot high all-white undulating shell-shaped stylised set by Zaha Hadid.
The futuristic stage included indeed a slanting runway that could change shape and created tensions especially when some of the characters in high-heeled shoes had to take them off to climb the steep parts of the stage.
In his career Chalayan also created the costumes for Handel's "Messiah" at New York's Lincoln Center around fifteen years ago and for several European modern dance performances.
This wasn't the first opera production staged in Los Angeles with an architect and a fashion designer turning set and costume designers. The Philharmonic's Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy project opened indeed in 2012 with "Don Giovanni", with sets designed by Frank Gehry (the architect behind the Walt Disney Concert Hall) and costumes by Rodarte; Jean Nouvel designed an open set for "The Marriage of Figaro" that featured costumes by Azzedine Alaïa.
While opera purists still remain doubtful of these experimental stagings, the trilogy has so far proved that starchitects and famous fashion designers can bring opera into the future by attracting younger audiences. The trend (as proved also by Arnaldo Pomodoro who recently designed the sets for a series of Greek classics currently on at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse, Sicily) is definitely here to stay.
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