Art prints: oh yes, in fashion everybody is at it, as seen also in yesterday's post. Most designers use such prints in a decorative way for merely commercial purposes, but that may not be the case with Rei Kawakubo.
Comme des Garçons may have entered the establishment thanks to a major and successful exhibition - Art of the In-Between - earlier on this year at New York's Met Museum's Costume Institute, but Kawakubo remains as anti-establishment as ever. The proof? While other houses' runway shows have turned into endless showcases in which everything - from artworks to other designers' collections - is recombined and remixed ad nauseam, in the last few years Kawakubo has chosen to present compact shows featuring just a few (usually outlandish designs) to be interpreted as parts of a performative act (while her stores sell wearable and functional clothes).
In yesterday's show held at the Russian embassy in Paris, Kawakubo came up once again with monumental dresses and coats that engulfed and swallowed the models.
The designs were covered in a series of prints and images borrowed from eleven artists and interesting surface elaborations.
One coat and one dress featured a starry-eyed girl in gorgeous yet naive colours by Macoto Takahashi; two monumental crinolined dresses included prints of Arcimboldo's visually rich flower and fruit figures.
Kawakubo employed for one of her prints Arcimboldo's Mannerist painting entitled "Vertumnus", a portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II re-imagined as the Roman god of metamorphoses in nature and life. Plants, flowers and fruits from all seasons symbolized in this case the perfect balance and harmony with nature that his reign represented.
A Dutch still-life contrasted with architecturally intriguing and futuristically complex pixoramas, high density environments part toy landscape, part video game courtesy of the pixel art collective eBoy (their illustrations were also recently employed for a Louis Vuitton's Tokyo travel book), established in 1997 by Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital. eBoy's London print was collaged with illustrations by Stefan Marx.
The large-scale oil paintings and art referencing collages of Anne Marie Grgich (in which the artist mixes old children's storybooks with her own drawings) reappeared on a cumbersome jacket together with Serge Vollin's richly coloured paintings of faces inspired by his dreams and nightmares.
Toys decorated the hair (by Julien D'Ys) of most models, and a few girls on the runway also donned necklaces that looked as if they had been assembled from the plastic debris you may find in a child's bedroom.
There were Hello Kitty memorabilia, a kawaii Sailor Moon figurine, copious amounts of plastic hearts, combs, bears and other assorted trinkets, these accessories linked the designs to the S/S 18 menswear collection that, as you may remember, featured Mona Luison's arty assemblages. Though you wouldn't normally wear these designs, the ensembles were matched with a commercial product, the latest collaboration with Nike, a sort of heeled boxing shoe.
So were the multi-dimensional prints combined with childish decorative elements made with discarded toys hinting at happiness and joy? Well, don't be too fast in judging.
One grey ensemble featured indeed a print of a Japanese ink painting representing a raven, the work of Sesson Shukei, a Japanese Zen monk and painter from the Muromachi period who followed the style of Sesshū Tōyō. There was also a huge bouclé coat decorated with sparkling crystals and with white lace tracing a pair of angel wings in the back, while the closing ensemble with its prominent hips challenging proportions came in the same shade of blood red that characterised CdG's S/S 15 (horror) collection.
The exuberant joys of youth were therefore toned down by these references to lost innocence, mature age and death, a concept reinforced by the funeral music that closed the show, killing all optimism ever raised by the plastic debris of a consumerist society used as decorative elements in decandent times. In a nutshell, this collection was suspended between the innocent world of childhood and an adult world of corruption, repression and depression.
Or maybe the key to unlock the collection was in Arcimboldo's paintings: his portraits were an expression of the Renaissance mind's fascination with riddles, puzzles and the bizarre, perfect therefore to describe the modus operandi and the mind of a designer who is going to turn 75 this month but who seems to be still intent in giving a two-fingered salute to the establishment with her cryptic fashion collections.
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