One sub-trend that has emerged from the A/W 23 collections is the desire of some fashion houses and designers to go back to the roots of their practice via an emphasis on fabrics or to go back to the beginning of their careers and rediscover some of their most successful pieces.
This trend also characterised the contents of the press releases: for quite a few years now fashion houses have accustomed us to press releases that sounded in part like essays. Often they displayed more conceptual ideas than preoccupations with real matters and, while philosophically interesting, some of them sounded very abstract. Yet in some press releases for the A/W 23 collections, designers re-shifted the attention onto something more tangible and less abstract, in particular textiles and fabrics employed in their collections.
Some, like Anrealage, did so to highlight the innovative materials included in their collection; others did it to show their research into sustainability.
Rick Owens, for example, unexpectedly put emphasis on his textiles in the press release for his A/W 23 collection, showcased on Thursday during Paris Fashion Week.
The designer explained that the collection featured GRS certified recycled cashmere and polyamide, responsible wool (materials employed for his monastic knitted capelets and ribbed dresses slashed one side and trailing down the runway) and vegetal tanning.
The shredded and fraying denim designs for the jackets, coats and skirts, was instead indigo denim from Japan. After treating it with a mineral wash, the fabric was shredded by lasers to obtain this effect, the press notes highlighted.
Owens also included in the collection a reinvented version of Charles James' iconic 1937 padded jacket, a piece he already borrowed twelve years ago and that he reinvented in this collection, deconstructing it, making it look less sculptural around the shoulder areas and upping its volume, but retaining its Haute Couture flair.
Yesterday, Rei Kawakubo explained to the fashion press that, through Comme des Garçons' new collection, she was trying to go back to the beginning of the world. This was symbolically done by focusing on a variety of materials and working with free patterns.
Fabrics took center stage and were used to create trademark Comme silhouettes, bulbous, lumpy, geometrical or abstract.
Models walked in groups of two, three and four and symbolically represented 11 chapters of a story on the runway, each characterized by a different soundtrack that went from Siouxsie and the Banshees to Sun Ra & the Arkestra, from Can to L7.
At the beginning of the show, the models donned square oversized tops characterized by primitive tailoring and matched with spherical skirts, some of them decorated with doughnut-shaped padded elements or with rolls of fabrics resembling scrolls. Then came flat black padded fabrics with pleated ruffles of frothy tulle protruding.
Kawakubo also played with exaggerations in a dress with an oversized Peter Pan collar, and with the accumulation technique, adding tone on tone shocking pink roses in one design and bows or onion-shaped elements in others.
The technique also inspired the headdresses: the most colourful ones looked like assemblages of a very simple craft material, children's pipe cleaners (thanks, now we know what to do with the leftovers of a botched domestic craft project!)
The final dresses integrated instead soft cage-like structures (or were those architectural girders?) in the same colour of the designs.
Another designer who felt he had to press the reset button and go back to the beginning was Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga.
In this case the choice was dictated by the advertising Balenciaga-gate incident, a scandal revolving around bondage teddy-bears and Supreme Court ruling papers related to a landmark child pornography case.
After that Gvasalia decided to hide from prying eyes and focus on his work. This new direction also inspired today's show in Paris: Gvasalia scrapped indeed the theatrical runway and put the spotlight on the clothes. Abandoning the mega set wasn't a bad idea, considering that for years it overshadowed the collections (in general, actually, not just Balenciaga's).
Eliminating the dystopian sets, mud pits included, meant no more distractions and the possibility to experiment more on deconstructions. Gvasalia announced that with this collection he wanted to carry forward Cristóbal Balenciaga's legacy, yet the runway was more about himself than about the founder of the house, with pants transformed into jackets, trench coats with ample shoulders, biker clothes and his trademark floral-print dresses forming the glossary for the A/W 23 season. Stirring the ship out of the storm will not be easy for Gvasalia and Balenciaga, but there may be a new beginning ahead for both, marked also by the elimination of logos and visible branding.
Beginnings are tricky things. For the Gospel of John in the beginning there was the Word, for The Slits, in the beginning there was rhythm. But beginnings are also very exciting as they help us telling a story in a different way.
The writer Alexander Trocchi never seemed to be happy with one beginning, he would indeed find different beginnings to tell the same story and to look at it from different points of view. Conclusions are the tricky bits, instead, because that's when you have to wrap things up in a convincing way. But fashion doesn't care about conclusions as it never ends, it goes around in circles and that's why going back to the roots or to the beginning works particularly well in this industry.
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