There is something extremely fascinating in deconstructed dishes by famous chefs: a mille-feuille cake may for example lose its perfectly stratified configuration and its perfect layers may end up being broken and reconfigured on a plate, something that will disrupt the traditional mind image you had of that specific food. Yet there is also an incredibly frustrating feeling when you see a familiar item, object or food being destroyed or broken into smaller parts that may lose meaning for you. This is what happened in Schiaparelli's Haute Couture A/W 2017 collection.
Creative Director Bertrand Guyon took indeed the main codes of the historical fashion house and reduced them to details or reconfigured them a bit with mixed results.
The starting point for the collection were a group of strong and independent women who lived around the same time as Elsa Schiaparelli, among them photographer Lee Miller, publisher and rebel Nancy Cunard, writer Anaïs Nin, surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington and artist Marie-Laure de Noailles.
Schiap's spirit was clearly infused here and there: the show opened with a pair of white pants covered in large pockets that evoked the functionality of the "Cash and Carry" collection.
Then a practical jacket in see-through PVC followed, its pockets revealing a smartphone and a pair of headphones almost to show how modern it was, but essentially the garment was a remix of Schiap's iconic cape de verre in rhodophane, while the designer passion and experiments with transparent materials combined with her trademark Baroque appliqued embroideries prompted Guyon to come up with swirling embellishments in iridescent plastic.
After appearing in the S/S 16 collection, the ubiquitous lobster came back inscribed in a circle and square à la Leonardo's Vitruvian Man that decorated the bib of white leather overalls.
The sequinned sun on Schiap's 1938 shocking pink "Phoebus" cape turned instead into an appliqued sun on a mini-dress.
Then there were Jean Cocteau's profiles transformed for the occasion into Cubist faces decorating square jackets or into black and white puzzle pieces.
Schiaparelli's gloves with red leather or metallic appliqued inserts where the nails should have been were also reinvented in crimped tulle, and the musical notes of her 1939 gowns and gloves or other trademark symbols like padlocks and keys were turned into fabric inserts or strass brooches (well, padlocks were also used as decorative elements on patent leather boots and on clutches).
The evening offer was still inspired by liberated women in the '30s, but it was maybe more convincing with gowns in soft multi-coloured graduated chiffon (according to the Creative Director this was a palette borrowed from a Rothko painting) and impalpable tulle and dresses with pleated skirts.
Shocking pink obviously made an appearance in a silk chiffon evening gown with a collar in crystal mesh (expect to see it on the red carpet at some point...). Yet, while interesting, these designs and in particular the gowns with trompe l'oeil belts or faux necklaces weren't incredibly innovative nor amazingly memorable and reeked more of Guyon at Valentino than of Guyon at Schiaparelli.
Guyon also seemed to have a problem balancing the front and back of the designs: in some cases he suspended an evening dress from barely there shoulder straps, in others he tended to overembellish the back of capes to imitate Schiap's most famous designs, but ended up overdoing things like in the final cape with its saccharine sequences of concentric frothy hearts (surely Guyon doesn't want us to imagine androgynous Nancy Cunard wearing that, or does he?).
Currently in his third year at Schiaparelli, Guyon has tried to find his path around a house with a difficult legacy and so far things haven't always worked out.
While he has a grasp of Schiap's history, he has the talent, he likes focusing on details and scatters hearts here and there on his designs, his collections often lack real passion (you wonder why Guyon doesn't create a line of quirky accessories, but stops at clutches with padlocks...where are Schiap's crazy necklaces that still make us dream and inspire us when we see them on Pinterest?) and you find yourself wondering how long Guyon will remain here.
Maybe relaunching this house was a mistake or maybe they should have started with perfumes, make-up or small and affordable accessories rather than branching into Haute Couture. As it stands, Schiaparelli is not the house built by a fiercely independent woman with a clever mind, a quirky taste and surreal inspirations, but an almost irrelevant brand that only appears every now and then on the red carpet, so why should it go on living like this?
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