Haute Couture: AW16/17
Each season, the creations from Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris capture the world. The aesthetic offerings of the week display the ingenuity and craftsmanship of every designer. From the presentations, to the pieces, down to every last stitch, cut, and tear, each creation goes far beyond mere sartorial ephemera, something disposable, but rather come into existence as a superlative form.
We bring you the highlights of the Haute Couture Fashion Week AW16/17.
Yuima Nakazato
“Combining technology with craftsmanship could be the future of couture,” said Nakazato. His designs at this year’s fashion week gave audiences a taste of the future of fashion through Nakazato’s unconventional and innovative lens. He presented iridescent shades of blue for his space goddess dresses, overwhelming shimmering and sculptural gowns. His futuristic feathery ensembles used coloured layers of PVC cut by machine and then were “treated as origami”. The Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture chose Nakazato as an official guest designer for the AW16/17 Haute Couture season. As the only Japanese member in this season’s lineup, he was also the first Japanese designer to show at Haute Couture Fashion Week for almost a decade.
Francesco Scognamiglio
Showing couture in Paris has been a lifelong dream for the designer, who approached the show with a fitting sense of reverence despite the rush, having learned he was officially on the calendar only one month before it began. Nevertheless, Scognamiglio’s collection was opulent. He featured crystal-embroidered veils, sculptural silver body jewelry in rose motifs, lace encrusted with real gold, silver and glittering under-layers on sheer gowns. The construction of the garments was based on traditional couture techniques, but with Scognamiglio own conceptual redesign with plissé ruffles gathered into dramatic floral formations, or forming a heart-shaped motif at the back of a dress.
Atelier Versace
Atelier Versace celebrated a new generation of women with this collection. Designer Donatella Versace says she created the collection as an ode to female empowerment. The House referenced ancient Greek sculpture, to express female empowerment. The intricacies of draping, wrapping and folding were explored, with pieces curving around the body to create intricate silhouettes. Models glided down the runway, their flowing gowns following their movement.
Schiaparelli
The designs of Schiaparelli intersected with the art world as references to Cubism and Surrealism abounded in Bertrand Guyon’s third haute couture collection for the label. The historic fashion house took inspiration from its own Circus collection of 1938, which meant an infusion of rainbow colourways and highly detailed embroidery work. Guyon also explored Picasso and Man Ray — artists with whom Elsa Schiaparelli herself had dedicated friendships and collaborations back in the day — in bustier tops sporting abstract shapes and primary colors. Other symbols, like Jean Cocteau’s eye, made it to the runway in the form of a gold brooch, holding a thigh-high slit together, while Salvador Dali’s lips adorned the hips of a square-shouldered, midnight blue-colored column gown.
Iris Van Herpen
Few designers explore the potential of technology in fashion quite like Iris Van Herpen. The Dutch designer presented a collection inspired by cymatics – the visual representation of sound waves.
“The collection shows a variation of organic and three-dimensional structures, new materials and techniques and biomorphic volumes,” Van Herpen told the New York Times. The presentation took place at l’Oratoire du Louvre, an 18th-century Protestant church. Van Herpen stood her models on concrete plinths as Japanese musician Kazuya Nagaya brushed his golden Zen bowls, producing pings and drones that reverberated through the space.
Chanel
Like past Chanel shows, Largerfeld displayed his creative prowess yet again at Chanel’s couture show. In recent seasons, Chanel’s haute couture productions have transformed Paris’s Grand Palais into a supermarket, an airport, an iceberg, a fairground carousel, the interior of a jet, an art gallery and a casino. This season saw Largerfeld create a setting that recreated the ateliers at the Rue Cambon where the collections are made, complete with desks and dummies, mirrors and pattern-cutting tables. It was quite literally, fashion in the making. The pieces were quintessentially Chanel rich with elegance, jewel encrusted gowns, a diverse palette of subtlety and an exploration of the historic sartorial spectrum.
Maison Margiela
“Make it your own,” was the advice that Martin Margiela lent Galliano before he became creative director in 2014. Two years in, it seems that advice was very much taken. This recent collection was strong and bold and took its cues from Napoleon himself, as well as from his wife, Josephine, and the so-called Incroyables, and turned them (at times literally) upside down and inside out by mixing in skate culture. Pieces were jagged, patterned, belted, angular and mismatched. They were Maison Margiela.
Viktor&Rolf
Almost an exercise in repurposing their own designs, Viktor&Rolf’s collection was created using select fabrics and garments and mementos from past seasons. Fabrics were torn, mixed up and woven by hand to create new voluminous shapes and textures. Vintage pieces were also used as a starting point for elaborately decorated garments such as embroideries consisting of dense, organic mixtures of repurposed buttons, beads and crystals.
The duo drew inspiration from Dickens’ Vagabonds. With their thrown-together, tattered and seemingly mismatched look, their collection repurposed the past, reflecting a thoughtful attitude and a focus on conscious design. fluoro spoke to the designers about their new exhibition at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Stay tuned for the feature which is set for release soon.
“I don’t know what normal means, anyway,” Karl Lagerfeld told The New Yorker in 2007. Normalcy places limitations upon the designer and innovation is stifled. The designs this week were far from normal, displaying creations out of this world, deeply rooted in the very purpose of fashion – not trend – but a way to wear innovation, creativity and ingenuity.
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