If you know your fashion history, when you watch a fashion show you may be able to easily spot references to or unexpected connections with previous designs. There were such déjà vu moments also during the latest menswear shows.
Kim Jones' at Dior Men combined a vision of Haute Couture with a tribute to Judy Blame in his A/W 20 collection. The designer studied the French house archive, embroideries, embellishments and silhouettes, then reinvented them with a subversive touch to create an elegant wardrobe for men.
The results were striking and at times costumy as proved by one opulent cape with a sparkling embroidery reproducing a cascade of feathers, reminiscent of an evening gown designed by Bob Mackie in the '80s that featured a glamorous sequinned motif of palm fronds.
Talking about embellishments, Olivier Rousteing, literally swam in a sea of sequins in his designs inspired by the zodiac for Balmain.
Yet, his sensual nomads didn't study the stars via Abd ar-Rahman as-Sufi's Liber locis stellarum fixarum, but seemed to sport modern reinterpretations of Schiaparelli's designs from her iconic 1938 "Zodiac" collection.
A pink bomber with an embellished sequinned motif of a sun was a reinterpretation of Schiap's "Phoebus" cape; a black coat covered in silver and gold motifs, pointed at Schiap's "Apollo of Versailles" cape, while the horses on this cape (from the Apollo Fountain in the Parc de Varsailles) seemed to have been recontextualised as prints in one shirt.
Who knows, maybe Rousteing was trying to tell us he could be a candidate in case there will ever be a Schiaparelli menswear collection.
Elsewhere, Virgil Abloh left behind streetwear to become a champion of tailoring at Off-White and Louis Vuitton: for the former, he came up with a series of suits characterised by perfectly circular holes, the new symbols of the brand after Abloh decided to abandon his beloved black and white stripes.
Will Abloh copyright holes now? Not sure, but maybe he shouldn't as suits with holes (albeit in a more conceptual key and characterised by more relaxed silhouettes and cut outs) were already done by Rei Kawakubo for her Comme des Garçons' A/W 2014/15 collection.
Louis Vuitton's collection closed with cloud printed suits (at times covered in micro sequins to give the immaterial clouds an enhanced tactile quality) that made people think about technology and cloud computing. But, as models walked down a runway on which giant tools (inspired by the ones used by Louis Vuitton craftsmen) had been scattered for a Pop Art touch à la Claes Oldenburg, your mind raced to other cloud-inspired garments.
From Prince's ensemble donned in the "Raspberry Beret" video to Moschino's '90s suits and dresses and Jean Charles de Castelbajac's Pop Art S/S 09 designs, clouds have been a recurring theme in fashion. But maybe critics had their heads "ἐν ταῖς νεφέλαις", that is "in the clouds", as my philosophy teacher would tell me when I was too distracted in school to actually notice what was happening around me.
Comments