Terribly beautiful: Return of the Victorian style
Very pale, thin woman with high hair, thick shadows under the cheekbones and blue-black bruises under the eyes swims in a dress with frills, emphasizing the waist - something like this was the autumn-winter show of Alexander McQueen. Approximately the same could have been, say, the vampire Carmilla from the eponymous Gothic novel Joseph Sheridan Le Fan. Or many other Victorian literary characters, which were united by one thing - a terrible secret.
This fall, many notable designers succumbed to romantic trends and finally returned Victorian symbolism to various lists of major trends. Incidentally, it is just one of the facets of the already rather gloomy moods of the fall-winter 2015 season. And if for Sarah Burton, who is now in dialogue with the other world instead of Alexander McQueen, the choice of the topic does not seem surprising, then the mass of her colleagues with Victorian era worked for the first time. We understand what happened to them and how it all began.
How it all began
The British Queen Victoria, which owes its name to the Victorian era, spent 63 years on the throne: during this time there was more than one social and technological breakthrough in the country. Similar events related to fashion - never before has it changed so often and so drastically. It was at this time that the crinoline came into use by the British women - and in a couple of decades already they managed to bore everyone. The manufacturers of corsets were rampant and made the girls' waist even thinner, and the whale plates became longer (at some point they choked the female body to the thighs). Her breasts and shoulders, too, didn’t give a will: even at the very beginning of the reign, queen Victoria, a young, cheerful and in love with her husband, dressed quite chastely, and only jewelry was responsible for the wow effect.
Everything changed significantly in 1861, when Victoria's beloved husband Albert died after a brief serious illness. It was Victoria who was the first woman to dress the whole world in mourning. The black period was short, but significant: even those ladies who had nothing to do with the status of a widow began to put on the color of death. A painfully tragic dress code was in keeping with the spirit of the times: Victorian England was a sullen and unsafe place to live. Accidentally dying there was easier than not dying. Technical progress constantly presented people with new, not fully tested inventions: because of gas lamps and the emergence of electricity, there were constantly fires, and in the poor areas of London crowded with immigrants, robberies, prostitution, and deadly diseases raged.
Add to this the constant poisoning by a couple of various poisonous substances like lead, which have been persistently used in the beauty and fashion industry. Add on corsets, which in themselves often caused the girls to die. Add, in the end, Jack the Ripper, who in the eighties kept all the women of London in awe. And do not forget about the spiritual bonds that reigned in Britain at the suggestion of the God-fearing and emphatically virtuous queen. All bodily is bad. Betrayal, deception and even just sinful thoughts - is unforgivable. In general, the moods characteristic of those times are well illustrated by the throwings of the heroes of Thomas Hardy, the sisters Bronte and Jane Austen.
How Victorianism is back in fashion
In order to make life even easier in their imagination, the inhabitants of Victorian England began to mystify what is happening - hence the stories about vampires ("Dracula" appeared just in the Victorian era) and about the virgins in trouble who while away the days in the family castles and worry about threats. And it is precisely on this tendency to romanticize the life turmoil that designer Victorianism is being built this fall.
The already mentioned Sarah Burton and her reference Victorian things Alexander McQueen are in the lead here: here you will find both stylized corsets, and plenty of frills required for that era, and neat ankle-high ankle boots - all this combined with deathly pallor, black lace and a general, otherworldly look . He also quotes modern ideas about Victorianism of Ricardo Tisci in the Givenchy collection in autumn. There you will again find all the same silhouettes and imitations of corsets, velvet, lace and black. But Silence's approach is a bit more subtle: for example, make-up and styling of models makes a curtsy more like a Victorian gentleman than a lady. And the designer focused on the Puritan component of Victorianism: his velvet dresses are decorated with grid-tightened cutouts on the sleeves and collarbone - so he refers us to the harsh frames in which the female body was driven. These dresses, however, are now also provided with cuts to the thigh.
Cherry on the cake was trinity A.F. Vandervorst, COMME des GARÇONS and Yohji Yamamoto. The first brand seemed to modernize the costumes for the musical about Sweeney Todd, the maniac-hairdresser. And both Japanese-French brands showed surrealistic Victorian mourning cocoons with the same ones with crinolines, ruffles and lace. This would look like the widowed queen Victoria, if she were an anime character from the Hayao Miyazaki films.
How to wear
If such characteristic clothes are not to your liking, look for echoes of the trend for Victorianism in the collections of designers, to which the label "intellectual" is firmly attached. For example, in the autumn-winter collection of Céline, Phoebe Failo prepared Victorian coats with rows of buttons, stitching them in a chaotic manner. Simone Rocha went even further and literally rethought Victorianism. She designed cocoon dresses, supposedly made of upholstered Victorian furniture, significantly simplified the silhouettes of dresses (darkness, black lace and frills remained) and in general came up with the image of a girl besieged by vampires, diseases and excessively rigid moral dogmas, as young and modern as possible. Even the house of Valentino, the embodiment of everything weightless and girlish, showed a very dramatic collection with puritan black dresses (a collar under the throat - by itself), skirts in ruffles and the finest clothes for fashionable ghosts - layers and layers of flowing black mesh.
Of course, one hundred percent stylization under the era of gothic ladies, who are permanently ready to lose feelings, cannot be called all these shows. But this is not necessary: we often saw too straightforward quotations from Victorianism in the collections of John Galliano for Christian Dior, and the time for nostalgia for those times has not yet come. But it’s still worth bringing some Victorian elements into your wardrobe. This is an investment for at least a year - in spring and summer this trend is not going anywhere either.
True, it will fall apart into smaller components: for example, Miuccia Prada was inspired by Victorian symbols - items from her collection for Miu Miu were filled with a heavy candlestick print, and the abundance of omnipresent frills on transparent dresses and aprons refers us to dresses in the spirit of the main heroine “Tess from kind of d'Herberville. " Alexander Wang, the main adherent of the Gothic in all its manifestations, in the autumn-winter season, slightly softened the colors in the summer: by his own admission, the summer collection doesn’t have any particular concept, but still it is full of Victorian leather corsets, worn on a naked body. - McQueen himself could have done such. And even Olivier Rusten, whose shows always have the atmosphere of an eternal holiday, could not resist and released several models in rather gothic looks: long skirts covered rows of frills (like at the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century), and instead of the wide belt, traditional for Balmain, the designer suggested wearing a short velvet corset.
But you should not wait for the summer - wear all the best right away right now, while this is especially important: we, like the girls of the Victorian era, do not have much time until the next sharp turn.
Photo: Showtime, A.F.Wonderworst, Valentino
