Haute Couture sets itself apart from ready-to-wear through the fabrics used in the collections, the materials, embellishments, and techniques employed to create a garment by hand. Therefore, you'd never see a piece of fabric wrapped around a model's body and held together with staples. Well, unless you're at Balenciaga.
Demna Gvasalia's fourth high fashion collection for Balenciaga confirmed his role as a dissenter who rejects Haute Couture's formality and conventions. Casual garments dominated the collection, but they received the Haute Couture treatment by increasing volumes or pairing them with saucer-like hats, sometimes randomly covered by a T-shirt for an effect suspended between trash can lid and lampshade.
A gargantuan coat and column dresses seemed to be made from what may have been leftovers from previous collections. Garments made from sections of discarded clothes often appear on the runways of designers who support sustainability (think about Marine Serre). In this case, rather than collaging one section of a garment with another to create a wearable Frankenstein's monster, the designer opted for a multi-layered approach.
Some dresses appeared to be made from random garments as if the models had absorbed the pile of discarded rags you may see in Pistoletto's Venus of the Rags, not to save the world, but to capture the public's attention. More exercises in layering were seen in an oversized T-shirt paired with loose denim trousers incorporating a built-in jacket around the waist. Some evening gowns characterized by more classic couture silhouettes were refashioned out of denim trousers, and one dress was made entirely of Balenciaga belts (not a new concept when you consider that Margiela repurposed belts in his Artisanal collections).
The Haute Couture twist in the garments came through textile interventions such as silk tuffetage embroidery in oversized designs, denim, leather, outerwear, and hoodies bonded with satin scuba to create sculpted forms. Heavy-metal concert T-shirts were hand-painted, not printed (apparently, it took 70 hours to hand-paint them), and a faux-fur coat in a blue reminiscent of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster was entirely made of synthetic hair embroidered onto silk organza (the coat was given a haircut and it took 13,0000 hours to fiish it).
A seamless black velvet column dress, covering the model from neck to toe, was conceived by Gvasalia as a display case for a piece of jewelry: the model wore indeed a Balenciaga's archival necklace from 1960. Most looks were paired with sharp pointed shoes (they say stiletto heels can kill, but in this case it was the pointed toe that was as sharp as a dagger...).
Yet some dresses made you ponder about the state of fashion and of couture in particular: one dress was made from melted plastic shopping bags molded onto the body, while another, a swirling mass of 47 meters of black nylon, was intended to evoke Cristóbal Balenciaga's precious gazar. However, that was likely the only thing it evoked, as the fabric was held together with staples and the dress was constructed just before the show, making it a piece of "ephemeral couture."
The staples weren't the cringing point, though: the real cringe came from the fact that the design would be accompanied by three Balenciaga staffers who will assembly it (using staples, I'm guessing) on the body of the client. And that's when you wonder if you're witnessing a genius taking the piss by managing to sell wealthy people a roll of fabric with three hired assistants to mold it onto the client's body, or if Gvasalia is simply being conceptually lazy.
The black evenining gown is divisive because for some the dress may not be consider a proper Haute Couture design; but others may see it as the essence of couture, something that can not be duplicated and that is made to measure according to the body of the wearer who will use it only once as the stapled dress will have to be disassembled to be removed.
Was the dress a distant homage to Loïe Fuller (evoked also by the butterfly masks in the collection) as photographed by the Reutlinger Photography Studio, her swirling skirts captured by the camera forming a vortex and hinting at dynamism and fluidity in choreography? Who knows, but maybe we're reading too much into it and that was just a black ball of gazar, held together by staples, an idea that maybe would not pass muster if crafted by a student for a graduation collection (as it would be deemed too lazy). Yet, kudos to Gvasalia if he made it to take the piss out of wealthy couture clients. They deserve it.
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