ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: David Bowie

Saturday, 6 July 2013

Haute Couture | Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 2013 Couture

Jean Paul Gaultier recently made a pilgrimage to London to catch the Victoria and Albert Museum’s hot-ticket “David Bowie is” show. “It was absolutely incredible,” he enthused, “fabulous. You see how clever he is in all his projects, and how he connected to art.” As a result, in his two-pronged show, Gaultier took Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona as the starting point for one side of his collection. This he fused with a vision of a 1940s Catwoman seen through 80s eyes “but not the 80s I was doing!” as he joked, for in place of his subversive gender-bending experiments in that exciting decade, Gaultier looked to a chic pencil-skirted Parisienne, complete with conical hat and teetering stiletto heels.

Discover the Jean Paul Gaultier F/W '13/14 Couture fashion show at the end of this post! LoL, Andrea

There was a whiff of the 80s Memphis-era palette too in the royal blues, hot pinks, and plum tones, in the layered chiffons that picked up the refracted colors in Bohemian crystal bead trim, and in the patterns based on the mottled covers of high school pupils’ traditional notebooks, worked in velvet flocked fabrics or in micro mosaics of Swarovski crystals. That embroidery technique was also used for astonishing tromp l’oeil big cat prints, and for a dazzling “leopard pelt” that glittered down the front of a gleaming black sheath, worn with an ankle-length dark mink hoodie. The feather coats that mimicked cheetah markings were another tour de force of haute couture workmanship, and there was classic Gaultier wit in a red fox boa that was actually crafted from ostrich plumes, and the jaguar-spot French twist updos. Inspired by a mid-century fashion photograph, Gaultier also used giant pockets that stood away from the body in an elaborate dropped peplum emphasizing the form-fitting hourglass shape of his jackets and dresses. Those giant pockets were also worked in quilted effects that mimicked the design of Renaissance textiles, with stitching and padding creating dimensional high relief. Meanwhile the costumes that Kansai Yamamoto collaborated on with Bowie in the early 70s were the starting point for sophisticated experiments in contour padding, cartoonishly emphasizing sweetheart necklines and curving sleeve and hip contours. The bride, who appeared to the strains of Bowie’s 1980 “Ashes to Ashes,” wore an ethereal version of this compass-drawn silhouette, in layers of fluttering tulle.

Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Photo credit/Source: VOGUE

Photography by Yannis Vlamos / InDigitalteam / GoRunway

More Couture To Love ...

'Haute Couture | Alexis Mabille Fall 2013 Couture'

"Alexis Mabille found inspiration in Giovanni Boldini and the society figures the Italian painter immortalized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mabille devoted his entire collection to them, and the 27 looks, named after the likes of courtesan Cléo de Mérode and social figure Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, were full of artistic touches."

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Resort 2013 Collection | Alexander McQueen

It’s been a long time since designers put much thought into tailoring a great pantsuit for a woman, but Sarah Burton herself a trouser person has been turning her attention to it for resort. After three seasons of crafting spectacular dresses almost exclusively, she’s plainly feeling more like taking on the menswear-derived side of Alexander McQueen’s legacy. “I thought it would be nice to go back to the body. To be sleeker, more sexy,” she said. “We had been doing a lot of peplums, but we took them away to make the torso fitted and wanted to visually elongate the legs as much as possible.”

Lee McQueen trained in men’s tailoring on Savile Row, of course a memory which is still very much alive in that bastion of British tradition. Only the other weekend, at opening day for the London menswear shows, his former co-apprentices at Anderson & Sheppard were remembering how the teenage McQueen applied himself for days, nights, and years to mastering the techniques that go into cutting a flattering gentleman’s suit. What he came out with was the ability to adapt the template to his own version for women, often topping it with a fairly swaggering tailcoat or topcoat. Now his own apprentice is adapting it further changes brought about by time moving on, and perhaps the fact that the perspective is more female. There are no bumsters in this collection, for instance Burton’s pants reach the waist (and sometimes higher, in one case, to be cinched with a wide patent belt inset with a jeweled chain). Although trouser legs are bootcut (as many of the McQueen originals were), the fabric Burton uses for her most stunning black tuxedo pantsuit with white revers is a drapery crepe, not McQueen’s favorite more rigid menswear material. The shoulders are peaked, but the gradual softening of structure Burton is bringing to the collection continues. And, when it comes to the chic combination of a tunic dress over fluid pants seen halfway through the collection, that’s an innovation of her own.

To get to this new balance of masculinity and femininity, Burton researched pictures of David Bowie in his gender-blurring Glam rock early seventies phase, Art Déco, and the gilded paintings of the Viennese Secessionist Gustav Klimt. It goes without saying that there are dresses in great variety pleated, gold-pailletted, and one a feat of marquetry-like patchwork on metallic snakeskin, all familiarly McQueen. It’s just that the eye always focuses more on the new. Which brings us to another point of McQueen evolution in this collection the jewelry. It appears as chain links on shoes as well as on belts, and there’s a new crystal circlet necklace, which is bound to be an instant object of lust.