Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren are no strangers to dolls: almost ten years ago the exhibition "The House of Viktor & Rolf", celebrated the 15th anniversary of the design duo's career at London's Barbican with a 6-metre high doll house designed by Dutch architect and art historian Siebe Tettero that contained fifty 70cm dolls dressed in outfits from various collections.
The inspiration for that event came from the doll houses at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and from the duo's 1996 installation entitled "Launch". The latter was a way for the designers to vent their frustration about the impenetrable world of fashion and featured a series of miniatures that helped them visualising the spaces and elements that made a fashion house - an atelier, a fashion show, a photo shoot, a boutique and a perfume.
The doll concept was also evoked in the 1999 "Russian Doll" collection, with a presentation during which Viktor & Rolf dressed model Maggie Rizer in eight layers of couture.
Yet the dolls on yesterday's Viktor & Rolf's runway were very different from the 2008 ones created by a traditional Belgian doll maker: they didn't have bisque porcelain faces and papier-mâché bodies, but they were human-sized dolls that walked and moved or rather, to put things more simply, they were models dressed up as fabric dolls.
Entitled "Action Dolls" the collection was indeed shown first by models dressed up as Viktor & Rolf dolls with oversized round heads (disturbingly similar to the look of Christopher Mark Sievey's comic persona Frank Sidebottom) and then by models without their doll attire (in a way, this was the same concept behind V&R's A/W 1998 "Atomic Bomb" collection...).
The dolls were different one from the other to embrace diversity: there were blonde and blue or pink haired ones, and once they removed their heads, they revealed themselves as black, white and Asian, and there were also two young men hiding behind them.
All the dolls/models wore massive bomber jackets made with a Japanese high-tech nylon fabric that had gone through the classic V&R treatment: the MA-1 flight jacket with its bright orange lining was turned into a series of cumbersome jackets and coats that cocooned or swallowed the models.
At times the garments were turned inside-out, though they were mainly extra padded, smocked, folded and ruffled; in some cases they also sprouted bows and flounces or developed several layers, multiple collars and elaborate sleeves.
When the models came back without the dolls' heads, they unzipped their coats to reveal what they were wearing underneath: jeans, T-shirts and floral patterned dresses (mainly matched with iconic Dr. Martens) decorated with fragments and tiles of fabrics in a patchwork style and with geometric quilted motifs.
You may argue the doll trick was a bit of a gimmick and a distraction, but couture is a laboratory of ideas and there were a few lessons to grasp here also for DIY fashion fans: recycling fabrics and learning how to quilt may indeed turn into an inspiration for many of us.
Recycling and recombining garments has been a message in V&R's A/W 16 and S/S 17 Haute Couture collections, and this was the third instalment of this upcycling trilogy.
V&R dubbed their dolls "eco-conscious" mascots, so they could be conceived as modern fighters covered in patchwork patterns symbolising unity.
Though surreal and slightly disturbing, the dolls were also funny and you wished you could have sent them to the G20 summit taking place this weekend in Hamburg. Just imagine: an army of giant dolls, soft, massive, cute, but also incredibly scary against unlikely politicians à la Donald Trump. Sounds just like what you need to counteract in a surreal way the latent madness in our real lives.
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