London Fashion Week: Christopher Kane and Mary Katrantzou
Chistopher Kane SS 2012
Before the show
The buzz around the starry front row began early Monday morning when the ambassador of the British Fashion Council and the wife of Prime Minister Samantha Cameron came to see Peter Pilotto’s show. The Christopher Kane show, on which Kanye West was spotted, became the second most important - in the sense of celebrities. However, the big good news was not they, but the joyful reaction of a grateful audience to the show.
Kane seems to have taken the trick of Gianni Versace: the ability to rotate kitsch in chic. A London-based designer with Scottish roots is known for playing with the most unexpected themes, turning them upside down and creating desirable and well-selling items from them. This time the theme was the room of a teenage girl from the outskirts - with bright stickers on the doors of the cabinets. If you are a little familiar with Newarthill, where the designer was born, or with the closest Motherwell, you should understand in which unfriendly places his inspiration could be drawn. However, there was no trace of gloom in the collection.
Watch the collection in full.
Instead, the show had brocade jackets, skirts and dresses made of metallized fabrics (ideally suited to the chrome setting of the building where the show was held, and views of the London skyscrapers), and under them the second layer, like from those stickers, appeared mint and yellow tones. In some places - on elbows, ribs or cuts - the fabric was sewn in the manner of origami.
The sporting element manifested itself through sandals and slippers, such as those worn in the pool, as well as jumpers with a deep armhole. All this was combined with mini-skirts with prints in the form of roses, which looked like pages from the diary of a very young girl.
There was another trick when kitsch turned into mastery. Last season, Kane created plastic parts filled with liquid that resembled the canisters of the 1980s. Now he decided to play with bright, multicolored, as if carved from somewhere flowers that looked like cheap decals hidden between gray or white layers of organza. The same theme was repeated on clutches - until everything changed again, and a pair of jeans with rhinestones appeared (a nod to the co-work of Kane and J Brand), and after that - thickly inlaid dresses, jackets and miniskirts, something like lush designs Versace early 90s. To all this - again, sandals, and again shiny.
After the show, the editors talked about "sporty chic" and "sports couture." And although the terms themselves are an oxymoron, perhaps this is the best short definition for a collection, especially if we recall the Olympics in London, which will be held next year.
Mary Katrantzou SS 2012
Watch the collection in full.
The first - at nine in the morning - showing the last day of the London week. Visitors hold tightly with cups of coffee. Mary Katranza managed to wake everyone up in one minute - as soon as the first model appeared and walked along a lush flower bed with colorful carnations in the center of the podium. Katranz's signature rich prints were inspired by spare parts broken by Cadillacs (the latter somewhat reminded of the Chalayan SS 2009 "Inertia" collection) and colors. Sometimes industrial even prevailed over natural, but there were moments when nature triumphed, and the colors on dresses, jackets and costumes were in harmony with the colors of podium carnations. By the end of the show, another theme appeared - the sea, with images of underwater landscapes, corals, shells and schools of fish living in the Pacific Ocean. The silhouettes were mostly narrow and restrained, but the theme of the sea, combined with prints in the form of crushed aluminum cans, went to dresses with lush skirts that resembled the forms in the previous Katranza collections.
In fact, it is the silhouettes that limit Katranza. She tried to make dresses with collages of different types of fabric, sleeves, chain mail, or knitted details, while the forms remained about the same. The designer actually lives in his own world - digital, vibrant, like Oz in the country of Victor Fleming. She learned how to make prints-pictures - with perfumes, vases with flowers or interiors, so that the pictures lay on the body and look perfect on it. But the form - while its weak point: in the collection may well be a cocktail dress of strictly adjusted form and a piece of chiffon, dragged behind.
The final exit - an asymmetrical dress, covered with metal elements, resembling, again, aluminum cans (all phones at that moment shot up) - only confirms this fact. Nevertheless, it became clear that London, where you can still see something really crazy on the catwalk, has already grown to the level of other world fashion weeks. Given the global economic downturn, this is indeed a significant achievement.
The editors thank the stores Ready-to-Wear.ru and the Rehab Shop for their help in preparing the material.
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- What year was the first London Fashion Week?
- What are the other fashion weeks that are included in the “Big Four Fashion Weeks” and which cities they are in?
- The main venue of London Fashion Week.
- Name the designer whose show opened the London Fashion Week S / S 2012.
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