Whenever I think about iconic fashion houses from the past being relaunched in our times, I also wonder how can a contemporary designer take that legacy forward.
Quite often I find myself thinking about the new possibilities we have nowadays, the innovative materials and technologies that allow creative minds to come up with extraordinary pieces, and ask myself what such and such designer from the past would have created if these technologies would have been available then or if they would still be alive today.
You can bet, for example, that Elsa Schiaparelli would have probably been interested in wearables. Listening to the cicadas this morning brought to my mind the dinner jacket characterized by wide shoulders and a narrow waist and featuring cicada-shaped buttons (and the belt from the same collection with a cicada-shaped buckle) from Schiap's "Pagan Collection" (1938).
As you may remember from previous posts, this collection featured a wide range of insects transformed as buttons or used as the decorative elements for a clear plastic necklace or a white straw hat.
Made of a translucent resin coated with pigmented cellulose nitrate lacquers (as the researchers from the Conservation and Scientific Research department at the Met Museum found out using non-invasive FTIR analysis), they are the proof that Schiap was interested in experimenting with innovative materials. So I wondered, as the cicadas sang this morning, how would she have reinvented this jacket with modern technologies?
I’m sure she would have put sensors in the jacket and would have transformed the buttons into tiny speakers emitting the song of the cicadas every time the jacket's sensors registered somebody getting near to the wearer. Guess this would be a great way to surprise people, make them smile and dream about Summer, holidays and the sun.
Have a lovely Sunday and click on the audio file at the bottom of this post to hear a few seconds of the sound of the cicadas I recorded this morning.
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