Welcome to Part Two of our Fall 2019 Couture Week review! Today we’re continuing on the subject of growth and transformation from Monday’s post with review of Givenchy and Viktor & Rolf!
Viktor & Rolf
You might remember their last couture collection that was sassy in the extreme. This collection was more introspective, described by the designers as rooted in “spiritual glamour.”
I admit that the term “spiritual glamour” sounds like the description of pretty much any product on the Goop website. Thankfully, the designers took the term “glamour” back to its roots when it meant “casting a spell”.
There is definitely the suggestion of witchcraft in this collection, in the most Mists of Avalon meaning of the word, with its earthy fabrics and astrological embroidery. There’s a home-grown sense of trust in the earth that grounds the far-reaching dreaminess of the embroidered moons and starts.
Claudy Jongstra
But the less obvious and infinitely more interesting takeaway from the collection is the concept of progress as not necessarily being linear.
Designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren collaborated with fellow Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra, whose work is really at the heart of this season. She works with her own herd of rare indigenous sheep to produce wool felt, by hand and using her own botanical dyes. It’s an extremely holistic process, and I encourage you to go to her site and see what she’s all about – it’s nothing short of enchanting.
Jongstra’s involvement, along with the designers’ use of fabric remnants from previous collections, challenges the viewer to rethink what progress in fashion means. The method, along with the designs themselves, present a curious balance of past and future.
The fabrics, heavy and earthy, impart a nostalgic praise of old-world artistry. Still, whenever the moon and stars are in the picture, it evokes that human desire to look into the future and beyond our current boundaries.What are we turning into? How are we growing?
This collection suggests that innovative design can be achieved by looking backward. Back to older ways, before fast fashion, when you knew the name of the sheep that produced the wool in your coat and when people made dyes from plants in their own gardens. What they’ve cast is a spellbinding story of when earth, animals, artists, and designers come together to create something otherworldly.
Givenchy
The transformation we see at Givenchy is less about design process and more about the images that the designs impart. This being the personal growth of a theoretical “noblesse radicale” as imagined by artistic director Claire Waight Keller.
If last season’s Givenchy offering was one of restraint, with its latex and clean-cut, “tabula rasa” approach, this one was by comparison radical.
Waight Keller’s vision was one of a woman living in an aging chateau (poor thing) and is pushing back against the structure itself. We see unfinished hems, unruly strips of fabric and lots and lots of feathers (were they synthetic, I might be even happier). She’s “anarchic,” a “bird woman trapped in the house,” according to the designer. It’s a theme and an archetype that beg to be psychoanalyzed.
It’s one of learning to maintain patience when trapped inside the order of society – be it in a career, in school , in relationships. We all operate within a structure, and to some extent, we all push back. We all run from room to room in that – forgive the extreme level of cheese – chateau of the mind, collecting experiences and saving them for that moment when we can free ourselves and move on to the next thing.
Feathers and Fringe
The feathers and fringe in this collection seem to grow every which way through the clothing, out from under hems and through seams. They appear to grow right where they were planted. It gave me the impression that this theoretical “noblesse” is putting in some time, waiting for her bird wings to grow so she can fly out of a hole in her roof.
It takes a brave sort of patience to cultivate growth from within a structure that is antiquated, falling apart around you, knowing that it needs to decay just enough so that you can make your exit.
It’s a fitting image for what Waight Keller, and the industry as a whole, is grappling with. We’re entrenched in our own norms, our own supply chains, labor practices, structural inequalities, etc. We have an idea that we’re not only outgrowing the old rules by virtue of our evolving curiosity, but if we don’t change soon, the old structure will crumble around us in the crushing mayhem that is any one of many possible apocalyptical scenarios (climate change, overpopulation, water shortages, widening poverty, etc). Hopefully we can find a better solution than simply flying away.
Unlike the Viktor and Rolf collection, I don’t see the Givenchy collection does not arrive at an end point in transformation their show suggested. We never know what Waight Keller’s noblesse finds after she escapes her chateau, and I’m pretty sure that’s the point. It is more a snapshot in time of that very human struggle for improvement, even if what lies on the other side is completely unknown.
What did you think of these shows? If you watch the YouTube videos, let me know what you think – watching the actual shows gives a much better feeling for the collections than just looking at photos!
love,
Stig.
