Fashion works in cycles, so, if you stick around long enough, you're bound to see something coming back at some point. And so it happened that while there were (obvious) echoes of Bonnie Cashin on Coach's runway during New York Fashion Week, Tom Ford's collection featured shiny moulded bustiers and bras that we saw in another time and another era (and in another post...).
Ford's collection, showcased in a subway station in Nolita, was a combination of sportswear and glamour (is this glathleisure, a mix of glam and athletic wear?) and while the trio of black, white and bright orange floor-length skirts matched with casual shirts with rolled up sleeves that opened the show looked elegantly practical, the super short sexy silk boxing shorts paired with satin blazers or the Halston-evoking draped gowns weren't desperately new.
And then there was a moment of pure déjà-vu towards the end of the show when Ford came up with shiny moulded bustiers and bras in bright metallic shades. Some critics saw in them Ursula Andress's rapid-fire brassiere in Elio Petri's The 10th Victim.
Yet Ford's bustiers and bras had other origins: they looked indeed like reinventions of Claude Lalanne's sculptures for Yves Saint Laurent created for his Haute Couture A/W 1969 collection.
In Lalanne's case the sculptures were plaster molds of Veruschka's breasts, torso and belly covered in galvanized copper and incorporated then in two dresses, one in blue and and the other in black crepe voile.
The history of fashion then recreated Lalanne's sculptures decade after decade: in the '80s Issey Miyake came up with a striking breastplate; Thierry Mugler created sensually robotic or transparent corsets; the late Alexander McQueen designed a transparent neck-to-hips bustier in which he sandwiched live worms for his Spring/Summer 1996 collection ("The Hunger"), while in his S/S 1999 collection there was a moulded leather body corset.
Sculptural corsets were also integrated in dresses in Hussein Chalayan's Autumn/Winter 2009 collection ("Earthbound") and Francesco Scognamiglio adopted the idea of full-torso corsets with sculpturally detailed breasts in his A/W 2014 collection (all these connections were explored in a previous post a few years ago, so check that out).
So, is this a case of plagiarism? Well, Ford is not new to lifting ideas from other designers and collections, and he certainly knows his fashion history and where to get inspirations from. In this case he tried to vary a bit the theme, coming up with the bustier in super shiny bright colours that evoked Jeff Koons' metallic artworks for that futuristic cyborg touch. Yet maybe this wasn't the freshest idea he had for this collection.
The best intuition Ford had for this season wasn't indeed on the runway: as new chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) he reduced New York Fashion Week to five days. The schedule became more compact and therefore benefited from this cut. So, who knows, maybe Ford's future is not on the runway, but behind the scenes, supervising, reorganising and managing the New York calendar.
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