The Vienna State Opera first released news about Olga Neuwirth's opera "Orlando" in 2015. Scheduled for December 2019, the opera is going to be based on Virginia Woolf's eponymous novel, her first big literary success, revolving around gender identity, love and artistic creativity. The work is supposed to be a bit of a landmark, since Neuwirth is the first woman composer to be commissioned by the Vienna State Opera in 150 years.
"The essence of this fictional biography is the love for oddities, the supernatural, deceit, virtuosity, exaltation and exaggeration. It's also about remembrance, about a sophisticated form of sexual allure and against the restrain toward a single gender," stated Neuwirth in a press release that came out when it was first announced she was going to compose the opera for the Wiener Staatsoper.
Neuwirth's description of "Orlando" could have been used to describe Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons Homme Plus collection.
Showcased last Friday in Paris during the menswear shows, the collection moved from Virginia Woolf's" Orlando" and retained a strong connection with Neuwirth's work for the Vienna State Opera as Kawakubo is currently working on the costumes for this piece.
In the collection Kawakubo questioned the roles of man and woman while also tackling the themes of transformation and travelling through tailoring. "Transformation and liberation through time," was indeed the designer's tag-line for this collection.
The designer progressed scene by scene: all her models donned a Woolf-like waved hairstyle and CdG branded pearl necklaces with T-shirts decorated with oversized brightly coloured jewellery with large gemstones.
Jackets and coats were the most important pieces of the collection, the designs in which Kawakubo experimented the most with style and tailoring from all sorts of times. There were indeed ruffles and frock coats; corseted coats with tails and voluminous puffed sleeves juxtaposed to rigorous military styles.
Some of the textiles incorporated glittery motifs; others verged towards the futuristic with digital prints of modern characters that may have been borrowed from a sci-fi film set in a dystopic metropolis, and then there were toile de jouy patterns with a Cologne cityscape from 1531.
The map of Colonia was taken from a woodcut by Anton Woensam von Worms, which shows the late medieval Cologne in detail in large format.
Various saints float in the clouds, such as Agrippa and Marsilius, each with one of the two coat of arms, while angels hold a ribbon with the inscription "Colonia" and the map features the title "O felix agrippina nobilis romanorum Colonia" (Oh Happy Agrippina of the noble Roman Colonia View this photo).
There was no transgression in this collection because this is after all Kawakubo's style, but there was a journey from one gender to the other that reflected Virginia Woolf’s story of a man who turns into a woman while moving through the centuries.
As the tailored thick grey designs turned into bright florals on a black background, the transformation - or rather the evolution - of the man into a woman was accomplished.
Yet, despite all these elements, and despite Kawakubo being focused on opera at the moment, there was nothing costumy on the runway and you could have easily imagined the coats, jackets, skirts, pinafores, petticoats and culottes being adopted by a consumer with a free-minded approach keen on breaking social and gender boundaries and rebelling to rigid rules and norms.
So what will be the result of the Virginia Woolf, Olga Neuwirth and Rei Kawakubo equation? Too early to say, but this was a general rehearsal, almost an anticipation of the things to come and was considered by Kawakubo as her "Act I".
The womenswear show will be "Act II" and the Vienna premiere in December 2019 will be "Act III". So we will have to stay tuned to see how it ends; in the meantime, it looks like the time has come for fashionistas to become well-versed in the wonderful world of opera.
Comments