ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Mary Katrantzou

Monday, 24 June 2013

Mary Katrantzou's Base of Black and White F/W '13/14

It seemed Mary Katrantzou deliberately threw herself at everything that doesn’t come naturally to her this season: dourness of color, reduction of print, absence of trompe l’oeil wit. Most of all, she appeared to be out to tackle conceptual cutting (with a big nineties C) experimentation in abstract shape that never sits well with her usual modus operandi of surface decoration and storytelling.

Well, you could see where Mary was coming from. Backstage, she articulated her need to step outside her comfort zone. “I wanted to step back from color and print and contemplate shapes and silhouettes. It was important for me to take that time,”she said. It was the first season we draped on the stand in a very complex way.”

You can sympathize with her dilemma. The sudden withdrawal almost a panicked rush from all that is bright and playful was endemic on the New York runways. Katrantzou has been a leader in color and print since she burst onto the scene in London in 2009, and being a hyperintelligent young woman, is one of the first to mentally internalize the desire for change. The trouble is that in doing so, she, among many others, ran into the danger of pushing faithful followers out of their comfort zones, too. Yes, there’s a need to switch things up in fashion. But the current severity of the designer-response begs the big question: Do we want to deny ourselves the joy of clothes?

Actually, Katrantzou hasn’t abandoned print altogether she just stripped back her multicolored pixel-popping palette to a base of black and white, inspired, she said, by looking at turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographs by Edward Steichen, Clarence White, and Alfred Stieglitz. So yes, you could catch fragmentary images of trees and iron bridges and blurry skies wound around her asymmetric cuts and bell-shaped skirts and displayed on severe, flat-as-a-board, off-the-shoulder structures.

Some of her experimentation in shape read for anyone who can recall that far back as straying into the territory mapped out by Alexander McQueen or Hussein Chalayan in the mid-nineties. That, and a touch of geisha-influenced wrapping and folding. What it meant was that the delightful harmony between theme and playful silhouette she has made her own became disrupted.

There are two saving graces here. One is that Katrantzou has developed an extensive line of commercial options that she sells alongside her runway collection so there will be simpler, wearable shirts, dresses, jackets, and knits on offer in her showroom. The other is, whether or not her efforts to stretch herself this season were successful they do demonstrate her courage and daring. Young designers all good designers, actually need to be able to take risks. Perhaps this season will prove to be a creative stepping stone to something stronger next time. Katrantzou, after all, has only been in business five years, and despite the fact that she has built up a global clientele, it’s healthy that she still wants to push herself to learn.

Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories

Photo credit/Source: VOGUE

Runway: Photography by Marcus Tondo / InDigitalteam / GoRunway

Details: Photography by Gianni Pucci / InDigitalTeam / GoRunway

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'Impossing Silhouettes by Mary Katrantzou Resort 2014'

Saturday, 22 June 2013

Imposing Silhouettes by Mary Katrantzou Resort 2014

The kaleidoscopic Mary Katrantzou jolted her audience and disconcerted many by showing a fall 2013 collection of black-and-white digital collages of wintry trees and iron bridges. But while she was designing all that, she had something else up her sleeve too: her debut resort line, in which, she laughed, gesturing around her new showroom, “The winter collection blossomed!” Yes, hyper-colored florals and impossible landscapes are all back in place in the Katrantzou universe, and that is going to make her many followers very happy.

And Mary is making sure she knows exactly who those followers are, often on face-to-face terms. An enthusiastic traveler, she’s been all over America and to Brazil doing trunk shows recently, and has had her eyes opened and creativity encouraged by the women and places she’s seen. “Dallas!” she cries. “I had no idea about the age range of people who buy my things both mothers in their forties and their fifteen-year-old daughters; girls in their thirties, like me, up to women in their sixties. I’m understanding it all much more now. I realized I can go younger, if I want to.” So, this collection spans shorts, jumpsuits, and a charming tunic-dress with a chiffon cape for the young and leggy, and goes all the way up to a matching structured, embroidered tailored top and pencil skirt which might look perfectly appropriate on, say, a diplomat at an embassy reception.

It was rounding off her Americas trip in Brazil that gave Katrantzou the blast of sunshiney sights that contributed to some of the surreal patterns that swirl and merge to create flattering optical effects. Prints of tower blocks, repeated and regimented, swirl out on a dress with a gloriously full skirt the top stories diminishing to vanishing point at the waist. Other elements are English roses blooming on geometric trellises, chinoiserie lakes and sunsets, Victorian shopping arcades and Japanese cherry blossom in an intense shade of magenta. What’s evident in these pictures is Katrantzou’s exceptional signature an aesthetic that looks like a marriage of computer games and eighteenth-century interior decoration. Get her to describe even one of them, and you’re in for a trip: “So here is a Chinese fisherman,” she said, holding up a tunic. “He’s on a lagoon that blends with a desert overlooked by a really modern building. A bit sinister and weird!” A woman could enjoy hours of small talk at parties explaining that one.

There are also more flattering, easy to wear shapes in Katrantzou’s resort. What she describes as the “imposing silhouettes” of last winter’s runway show have softened into “exploring volume in a less extravagant, lighter, younger way.” They are often most effective in movement the swirling circle skirts, the flutter of capes. The blurred double images on the underlayer and overlayer on a violet and yellow strapless dress give the illusion that the image is almost vibrating in 3-D as the wearer walks.

That all this color and ingenuity should be bursting inside a gray industrial edifice in North London is a testament to Katrantzou’s Mediterranean eye, her intelligence, and business acumen. Just how well her clothes sell is reflected in the fact that she’s steadily taking over the building and is currently recruiting sixteen more members of her staff. Some of the jobs are in operations and logistics (she is starting e-commerce next season) but, the designer shrugs, “I’m looking for five people to work in print. There’s always more to do in print at Mary Katrantzou!”