AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Alexander mcqueen runway looks8/18/2023 She was followed by the kind of creatures never before seen on a catwalk, their hair twisted back into towering, Predator-like sculptures, some a foot high. The first model emerged in impossibly high platform heels, her dress a digital print that veered between animal and alien, her head covered in a series of ridge-like braids. As he had with his VOSS show of SS01, where guests had been confronted with their own reflections as they gazed upon a box of mirrored glass, McQueen turned the focus on his audience, the cameras scanning the crowd. In a darkened space, the audience watched as snakes slithered over the projected figure of model Raquel Zimmermann, before, out of the shadows, two imposing mechanical cameras sprung to life. The venue was the setting for Alexander McQueen’s SS10 Plato’s Atlantis show, inspired by the idea of a time when humanity, having wreaked havoc on earth, returns to the oceans. On October 6th, 2009, in an indoor arena in Paris’s 12th arrondissement, the future of fashion changed. With social media posts and live streams broadcasting to the masses, the fashion show is no longer the reserve of a rarefied few. But while the internet may have kicked things into overdrive, it’s also been responsible for the opening up of the once-secretive world of fashion, giving outsiders a glimpse into its previously hidden inner workings. Driven by technology and the need to fill the endless appetites of online audiences, fashion is a constantly turning carousel of campaigns, videos, Snapchats, and live streams, all responding to an unceasing demand for newness. From click-to-buy catwalks to creative directors citing the relentless pace as the reason behind their departures, the industry is spinning with ever-dizzying intensity. Sarah Burton is designing in a different world, but the themes she brought to bear, and the skills inherent in the house resonate more than ever today.If fashion today is defined by one thing, it’s speed. The references to the touchstones of the work of her late boss felt timely in this collection. She pursued that idea through different tactics, in swooped-fronted tailored jumpsuits, knitted dresses fashioned in tiered strips leaving open slices of negative space, and in half-open panels aerating romantic full-skirted evening dresses at the finale. I wanted to sort of embrace the female form to sort of slice away in a very kind of dissected way.” “It’s how would you adjust the proportion of a woman's body? I feel like it’s always about a woman dressing for a woman,” she added. But the red-hot relevance of torso-exposure, and clothes designed to expose slices of naked flesh needs no explanation to new eyes. There are generations that have never heard of bumsters-Alexander McQueen invented that explosive downward shift of pant design in the 1990s. Look two: a revival of McQueen’s bumsters, with a cropped tuxedo jacket cut into sharp points at the front and the rest of it balanced to swing at the back. Besides the decorative narratives, out came clean, sharp tailoring. “That played into it as well: how do you find human contact in the world we live in, in the world of technology?”īut we’re getting away from how her collection looked. Caring about each other.” But against that, she also meant that having open eyes on the world means taking on terrors. Just seeing each other, recognizing each others’ humanity. “Not walking around with your eyes shut, your eyes down. “It’s sort of about seeing things again,” she said. That thought gave her the impetus to begin to grapple with layers of themes that the house of McQueen has always been concerned with: nature and technology, deep history and present fears. “The eye is the most unique symbol of humanity-each one is like a fingerprint each one is completely individual,” she said, explaining the enlarged prints and raffia-fringed images of irises, pupils, and eyelashes embedded in dresses and spilling over a trouser suit. It seemed a symbolic irony that the mechanical eye-in-the-sky-a standard device these days for recording fashion spectacles-must have been surveilling the focus of Sarah Burton’s collection hundreds of feet below. On a sparkling October day in London, a drone was hovering over the splendid Greenwich Naval College, recording the goings-on in a transparent bubble that had landed in the middle of Sir Christopher Wren’s 17th century landmark.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |