Flowers and floral embellishments quite often return on the Haute Couture runways as they are perfect embodiment of femininity. In the case of Viktor & Rolf's Spring/Summer 2015 collection, though, the starting point were not flowers, but a summer floral dress, matched with flip flops and a straw hat.
The simplicity of such a garment was filtered through art, and reinterpreted via one of their main principles, accumulation. While at the beginning of the show the outfits looked based on one single shape - a baby-doll like A-line dress - and were still wearable, as the collection progressed, they became more elaborate, with added ruffles, multiple layers of silk organza petticoats and elements that literally exploded from the dresses.
Printed flowers took a life on their own and emerged from the fabric as hallucinating cut outs that crawled upwards reaching the straw headdresses, enveloping the models, mutating and creating voluminously exgaggerated embroidered motifs that extended through space.
There were echoes of previous collections in which accumulation and flowers played key roles and obvious references to the name of their successful "Flowerbomb" fragrance. But there was also something else.
The huge straw hats (reinforced with carbon fibres) and the wheat echoed indeed Vincent van Gogh's paintings of wheat fields - think about "Wheat Stacks with Reaper" , "Sheaves of Wheat" or "Wheat Field with Crows" - while the volumes of the dresses seemed borrowed from the shape of wheat sheaves.
In van Gogh's works, wheat fields were an opportunity for people to find a sense of calm, but they also symbolised a constant rebirth, an apt metaphor for fashion.
Van Gogh also painted these scenes in appreciation of manual laborers, a theme that could be applied to the ateliers working on Haute Couture collections, and, while the sower and the wheat sheaf standing for eternity in van Gogh's works may be further hints at the eternal and historical value of high fashion, the strongest connection with the painter in this collection refers to colours.
Van Gogh's early wheat paintings from the late 1880s were drab compared to the ones he made later on and that depicted fields from rural France.
In the collection the first dresses were characterised by an indigo print of flowers, but, as the designs progressed, they became more and more elaborate, with the flowers escaping the fabric and creating new spaces, becoming gradually more colourful, with Van Gogh's exuberant shades - sky green-blue, poppy red, yellow gold and yellow bronze - suddenly appearing.
A further link with Van Gogh may have been the catwalk soundtrack, remixed music from "Rosemary's Baby", hinting at madness, or the struggle with creativity the painter went through, the same sort of struggle fought by creative minds in fashion.
All the fabrics employed for this collection were produced by Vlisco, the Dutch wax fabric company dating back to 1846, and the first dresses were actually the results of the first bath fabrics take in the company's Helmond-based plant.
The company went through some problems after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa (its main market), and employing their fabrics was a way for the design duo to boost its fame and sales, and return at the same time to their Dutch origins.
Dutch art and fashion collector Han Nefkens acquired three pieces from the collection to donate to Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen as part of Nefkens' "Fashion on the Edge" project.
In an official press release issued from the museum, Nefkens stated: "I was impressed by the surprising way Viktor & Rolf have shaped their ideas and fantasies". Nefkens has worked in the past with the design duo and Viktor & Rolf's creations recently appeared in the "The Future of Fashion is Now" exhibition that closed in January.
Image credits for this post
Photographs of Viktor & Rolf's Spring/Summer 2015 Haute Couture collection by Peter Stigter.
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