ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Thursday, 27 September 2012

PFW | ROCHAS Spring/Summer 2013

After four years at the design helm, Zanini wanted to address his vision of the Rochas woman “a hopeless romantic who is not just sugary and sweet, she’s also powerful and strong”, and to riff on some of the signature silhouettes he has developed for the house, from a bias slither of a lingerie-inspired slip dress, to a dance frock with an acreage of bouffant skirts.

Zanini described it as “a labor of love in an optimistic spirit” and there was certainly a giddily upbeat quality to the collection, with the emphasis on classically feminine silhouettes in a cloudy-dawn palette of silvery gray, rose-mauve, and chalk, breaking into currant, chocolate and garnet.

There was an elegant modernity to the mix of classics with a fifties flavor pencil skirts in stretch satin, sun shirts cropped to reveal the midriff, structured brassiere tops and girdles, and those full-skirted frocks paired with classic polo shirts, and clinging, short-sleeved turtleneck knits. Down-to-earth wrestling boots in gleaming white kid leather, and clean-lined, unembellished purses updated the nostalgia.

Zanini reworked those polo-shirt shapes as tunics or abbreviated little dresses in luxe fabrications including chalk white or a vivid magenta-pink silk faille. His “joy of opulence” also expressed itself in the immensity of fabricm including Bucol’s magnificent lustrous satin, warp-printed with a design of ruby-red chrysanthemums used for clothes that seem to invite the wearer to swish a sunray-pleated skirt, or drape a double-faced satin stole or a full evening coat, with the gesture of a worldly mannequin in a mid-century Irving Penn photograph. But Zanini’s clean lines and fresh spirit bring that platinum print effortlessly into the iPhoto age.

Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Photo Credit/Source: VOGUE

Photography by © Marcus Tondo/GoRunway & © Filippo Fior/GoRunway

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'PFW | ROCHAS Fall/Winter 2012/13'

Collection, Fashion Show and Review

PFW | ROCHAS Fall/Winter 2012/13

In Edmund White’s recently published novel, Jack Holmes & His Friend, the friend a blue-blooded Virginian called Will Wright marries an eligible New York society swan called Alex in the early sixties. The couple prosperous, educated, Eurocentric live a bohemian, upwardly mobile life in suburban Westchester. They share a predilection for growing their own vegetables and Scandinavian home furnishings, while Will goes to work at a Manhattan promotions agency every day. In its way, Marco Zanini’s exceptional fall Rochas collection caught some of this mood; a mid-century Mad Men like urban sophistication tinged with a desire for the humanist elegance of twentieth-century Swedish arts and crafts.

During a visit the day before his show, the designer was visibly excited at the prospect of unveiling this collection. The Italian Zanini had visited the cultural landscape of his mother, a Swede, by looking at her fellow countryman, studio potter Wilhelm Kåge, who combined the simple and direct honesty of his stoneware with refined, graphic decorative motifs and a palette of jade, petrol blue, golden yellow, and an earthy brown.

Kåge’s aesthetic directly informed Zanini’s colors and his take on print and decoration, but rather than using clay to express himself, Zanini turned to the likes of storied Lyon textiles house Bucol to produce exquisite gilded jacquards that recalled Kåge’s work. “I was thinking about how to make everything look embellished from head to toe,” Zanini had said, “but I didn’t want to resort to doing it in an obvious way.” For him, that meant building layers of pattern and texture; there’s very little of this collection that hasn’t been worked to a staggeringly refined degree, with embroidering and beading overlaid onto some of the prints, the micro jacquard hose that covered the legs, the high- or mid-block-heeled substantial sandals that were a collision of crocodile, snakeskin, lizard, and stingray.

Zanini’s silhouette revolved around a roomy sense of ease and comfort that owed a little to the early sixties (cocoon coats, girlish pleated skirts, boat-necked straight dresses that narrowed at the knees) and also something to the geek-chic seventies (shirt dresses, ribbed sweaters, flares that miraculously elongated the legs). If the initial inspiration was deeply personal, it has to be said that his Rochas collection felt like it was the most intimately connected to Zanini’s view on what fashion should be: opulent without being excessive, refined without being safe, a pleasure in the beauty of awkwardness. (Many of his models were wearing bookish, heavy framed eyeglasses as if they were particularly myopic philosophy majors.) And he couldn’t resist a nod to the kind of woman he dreams might have worn the clothes; his slim-frame handheld purse was named Liv, in honor of iconic Swedish art-house actress Liv Ullmann. Will and Alex would have definitely approved.