Fashion collections are often completely detached from reality, despite the fact that ready-to-wear clothes are designed, produced and sold to be worn on an everyday basis. Yet it's rare to see what's in the news and what's on the runways perfectly matching and combining, even though that's more or less what happened last week. Sport-wise Roberta Vinci - a doubles specialist ranked 43 in the world - beat Serena Williams at the US Open 2015 semi-final, setting up an all-Italian final with Flavia Pennetta. The latter eventually triumphed at the singles final last Saturday.
Last week in the meantime we saw Giulietta's designer Sofia Sizzi mixing tennis and Courrèges, sport and dynamic silhouettes with geometric futurism in her Spring/Summer 2016 collection.
Body-conscious bodysuits pointed towards atheletic wear, even though geometry and stripes worked better in the less complicated numbers such as simple T-shirt mini-dresses with a pleated tennis skirt and tunics with embellished necklines.
Rather than interpreting the tennis theme in a literal way, Sizzi opted for an abstract representation of tennis balls and nets: the former were replicated in round and shiny appliqued elements on organza skirts and dresses matched with flat platform sandals, while nets were reproduced as grilles on short dresses and separates. Everything was polished and pristine, even though some pieces seemed to be a bit too rigid and formal.
Rather than channelling just tennis, Felipe Oliveira Baptista got on the Olympic bandwagon with his spring collection for Lacoste, the brand founded by tennis champion René Lacoste, himself an Olympic medalist back in 1924.
The collection was also an occasion to announce that Lacoste will be dressing the French delegation at the 2016 Summer Olympics next August in Rio de Janeiro.
Showcased in daylight at the Spring Studios last Saturday, the collection was optimistic and energetic with plenty of sharply cut coats and ergonomic dresses, such as a low cut jumpsuit with cutouts that highlighted the contours of the body. Navy and green were mainly employed for garments (including parachute nylon parkas) that borrowed from flight suits and uniforms.
The backbone of the collection, though, were the graphic deconstructed motifs of flags: Baptista chopped and fragmented the emblems of different countries, creating a mix and mash print that - at times evoking the works of the Russian Constructivists or the Italian Futurists - he reproduced on shirts, tanks, shorts and ponchos.
According to the designer this international and cosmopolitan camouflage inspired by the victory lap taken by athletes wrapped in their home flags was meant to celebrate peace and diversity.
Though it worked a bit better on menswear (but who says that women can't wear men's pieces?), the deconstructed print added a strong visual element to a collection that was otherwise suspended between army and sport gear and that equally borrowed from military uniforms (this inspiration actually helped Baptista offering more elegant and versatile suits and separates) and athletic wear.
The collection also featured the occasional spark of silver: a colour pointing towards parachutism and the Space Age, it also tied in with the theme of silver medals or the US Open cup trophy, a theme that takes us back to Vinci and Pennetta.
Both in their early thirties and with no win at a major singles final in their careers, Vinci and Pennetta may indeed have accidentally set a trend that could be defined as "the revenge of the underdog".
At the end of August, tennis champion Rafael Nadal, current global ambassador for Tommy Hilfiger, played in the middle of Bryant Park a game of strip tennis (lose a point, lose an article of clothing) against Tommy Hilfiger's models; around the same time Nike started selling the "Serena Greatness" collection designed in collaboration with Serena Williams (she was wearing it on the court at the Open), and teh tennis star will be staging her second HSN Signature Statement collection show tomorrow during NYFW.
There were no grand plans for collections for what regarded Vinci (bizarrelly she was fitted with a bright coral red uniform with a pattern that was very similar to Williams' orange red one, as if Nike couldn't be bothered offering any kind of variations for her since she wasn't that famous...) and Pennetta, but setting on their immediate goal (winning the US Open) rather than on endorsing and representing sponsors and brands, appearing on adverts, playing cameo roles in films and other fancy fashion ambassador roles reserved to celebrity athletes, they remained focused on their task and went on with their plan.
Fashion-wise we are often too keen on praising the grandest shows in which too much money has been pumped and with too many celebrities sitting in the front row, but, quite often, life proves us that the next big thing may be coming from unlikely places and from unlikely routes. The fashion industry should maybe take note.
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