Crafty designer duo Stephen Cox and Daniel Silver often create collections void of a tangible influence. Exploiting their own razor sharp wit and combined quirky mannerisms to realise a candid runway presentation. An authentic ethos which trickles from season to season, occasionally tweaked but entirely resolute in its signatures. Trademarks of generous plaids and checks often used to construct vastly varying proportions.
This time around we saw the twosome test the waters of acceptable volume, with generously cut widths almost as accommodating at the hem as they are the waist. Fluid volumes adorned with a bold plaid, a linear grid that both exaggerates and refines. The plaid also suggests a sparse colour palette of purple and red in an otherwise monochromatic presentation.
The single and double breasted blazers maintain a masculine frame, strong shoulders and sparse detailing which seems to warrant a playful pant or a vertically exaggerated under-layer. Speaking of, the concluding mid-thigh skimming shirt seems to mirror that of their ‘Bug Print’ shirt SS’11, playing to this strong brand ethos. Not to mention the warped lightweight knit maintaining an abstract ingenuity that the brand has been built upon.
Image source: Style.com
Posted by: Scott Goldthorpe
“UHU Gareth Pugh.” 2006, and Henry Holland’s cheekily exuberant slogan T-shirts, seem a very long time ago now. Both Holland and Pugh have since leapt off the Fashion East springboard into the mainstream, and Pugh in particular has become a key voice in modern fashion. His relentless, intense vision of futuristic power dressing (overlaid with haunting historical resonances) is now well established – to the point where his Summer 2012 show felt positively retro.
Not just in terms of the reworkings of his signature grids and stiffly articulated silhouettes, but in its’ echoes of the optimistic futurism of the Sixties – the monochrome blocks and sleek caged panels had a simplicity and a clarity more often associated with Cardin or Courreges than with Pugh’s own tortured vision.
As the show progressed, that sense of clean-cut lightness gradually faded, deepening into billowing storm clouds of printed chiffon and a final blast of fluid, sinister latex. The transition from stiff geometry to lushly liquid deconstruction was stunningly theatrical, and left Pugh’s vision hanging on a note of unexpected, intriguing ambivalence.
Images by GoRunway.com
Posted by: John-Michael O'Sullivan
Transformation. It was the spark that triggered Thierry Mugler’s iconic superhero silhouettes, with silver screen goddesses reincarnated as space age warrior vamps. It’s an obsession for Stefani Germanotti, the New York schoolgirl turned shape-shifting pop phenomenon who provided the soundtrack for last night’s Mugler show. And for design team Nicola Formichetti and Sebastian Peigné, the notion of transformation was critical – not, as in previous seasons, in terms of the end creation, but of the process itself.
Formichetti has spent over a decade playing transformer, from Dazed and Confused to Vogue Hommes Japan, and most notoriously with Gaga herself. And the silhouettes and nuances which dominated last season’s spectacular brand relaunch were all still present and correct – the warped shoulders and hourglass shape of a Hollywood siren, melded to the sculpted futurism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But in place of that collection’s stunning profiles, there was a restless sense of unease here, with garments still unfurling from amorphous cocoons, or breaking apart into sinewy strands. Shards of glittering rhinestone panelling, ruched chiffon and even a kimono-like print introduced dissonant notes of hard and soft into Mugler’s sleek palette of black, operating-theatre white and desert sand.
It was an unlikely marriage, between controlled authority and jagged, furious complexity: but it invigorated Mugler’s scalpel-fine Space Age precision with an excitingly human passion.
Images by GoRunway.com
Posted by: John-Michael O'Sullivan
Milan this season was a tutti-frutti roller-coaster through all things tight and Technicolour: but Paris, as always, has different ideas. Instead of hedonistic poolside sensuality, the mood shifted almost immediately towards a bleak, deconstructed poeticism which had less to do with summer heat than with a more abstractly seasonal sense of escapism.
You saw it in Harryhalim’s witchy mermaids, their long dresses shredded and studded with jetsam: in Aganovich’s wittily Continental translucent skins: in Corrado de Biase’s fringed swirls of liquid satin, splashed with Art Deco eau-de-nils and corals: and in Julien David’s wistful, tomboyish separates. And it was there in bucketloads at Josephus Thimister’s late evening Garage Turenne show.
The reclusive Dutch-born designer has oscillated back and forward from the epicentre of fashion for over two decades. Creative director of a pre-Ghesquiere Balenciaga in the Nineties, he’s also shifted between stints at Lagerfeld, Patou and Charles Jourdan: always near the radar, but never quite on it. And his own label, Thimister, has drifted on and off the official schedule since 1997, garnering plenty of critical acclaim but failing to find a permanent niche.
So it’s not surprising that there was an ageless, out-of-time dimension to the garments shown last night. Menswear and womenswear alike was imagined with a starched, medieval austerity: sleeked-back hair and ravaged knits, sweeping greatcoats and drifts of veil-like linens and sheers. The purity was troubled with punches of a more wordly aesthetuic, from the blunt artisan weightiness of leather corsets and utility belts to the twists of satin which gave his eveningwear a slinky Jazz age undercurrent. It’s a similar preoccupation to that of Alber Elbaz at Lanvin – the balancing act between weightless sensuality and controlled structure – but one stamped with Thimister’s complicated relationship between history and now.
Images by: GoRunway.com
Posted by: John-Michael O'Sullivan
