I finally started looking at the fashion shows for Sping 2010 over the weekend. I can't believe I missed it yet again. I shouldn't be surprised. I haven't even looked at the Fall collections and here I am thinking about fall clothes.
But on to spring.
I started with the last shows, as those came up first on Style.com. I am just now beginning to look alphabetically through the general list. So far little has captured my eye, especially in terms of things that I actually want to wear or make.
Alexander McQueen however has captured my imagination. These are not, for the most part, wearable clothes. But they are stunningly beautiful. The technique is amazing from the creation of the fabulous fabrics to the manipulation of print and volume in the actual dresses. The models, on fabulously architectural heels, completely unwearable, but the line, combined with the clothes references history and transcends it some almost otherworldly way. As seen in the photos the models in the clothes seem like otherwordly goddesses from some strange planet or magical world, tall regal beings both fragile and strong, perhaps from some world with gravity very different from our own.
Sometimes fashion shows are just for art and ideas, sometimes clothing is the stuff of dreams.
Some things are more wearable, perhaps by the more extreme, or socially protected among us. G particularly likes this dress, more than some of the dresses that are closer to the traditional mold. It is the contrast of the colors, of the form fitting bodice with the wide feathered skirt and the tough boots, a mixture of soft and strong and the completely irrelevant. The collection is all about volume, volume and texture and print. Sometimes texture and print are used to create volume or the illusion of volume. Sometimes structure is created for its own sake.
I love looking at all these things, just as I love a good romp with a fantasy novel with visually rich prose.
But there are clothes that make me think in more earthly terms. This jacket reminds me of the 80s and early 90s. The days when you might find me wearing Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana. I suppose I have always had a bit of a taste for the stylized extreme. The sleeves are a bit too exaggerated, but if I could modify the sleeves a bit without compromising the idea too much, I would wear this. On me I see this with pants, pants with full legs and a bit of volume to balance the sleeves, to contrast with the more fitted silhouette.
It is this coat, lined in fabric to match the dress shown underneath that I find most inspiring.
It is a coat and not a coat. I don't think you could take it off, so it functions like some kind of abstract coat-suit. It is like the idea of "coat" has been transformed into something else, recognizable but new. It looks so simple. I am sure it is not. To pull this off so that it looks good would require a mastery of cut and subtle structure. And yet I am fascinated by the idea of this as an ensemble, of some variation of this that might fit my more earth-bound life.
I don't suppose it will show up in Vogue patterns.
Your musings bring to mind an exhibit we saw in Paris year before last at the Arts Doratifs Museum (at the Louvre)of the Gaultier-Chopinot collaboration --Gaultier's wildly imaginative work for dance. Nothing practical about it at all, but provocative and productive and exciting, absolutely!
Posted by: materfamilias | October 13, 2009 at 05:35 AM