One may assume that with a physique of labor stretching from couture to fragrance and all the things in between over the course of three many years, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have performed all of it after which some.
“Once we began fascinated by the season, the picture of a feather got here to thoughts — I don’t know why,” Snoeren mentioned backstage after their fall couture present. “Maybe feathers, a fowl [flying], freedom. There’s all of that, nevertheless it’s additionally one of many tropes of couture, and we by no means did something with feathers.”
That’s been amply addressed, given there have been some 11,500 of them — with out counting additional feathered headpieces designed by Stephen Jones — packed into sleeves, collars, petticoats and coattails. They seemed to be so plentiful they spilled from seams in colourful curlicues.
And to present a way of why this was much more spectacular than it sounds: they weren’t pure feathers. Every was individually reduce from gossamer material and formed to look eerily like the actual deal. The British milliner likewise crafted his from tulle or colourful polymer sheets.
That accounted for 50 p.c of the gathering. Every of those 15 sculpturally stuffed silhouettes got here with a twin, an identical in reduce and materials however devoid of any stuffing, experiments that emerged throughout becoming, Horsting mentioned.
Facet by aspect on the runway, they couldn’t have seemed extra totally different.
Quantity gave area for particulars to return to the fore, highlighted by the colourful padding, making satins and sequins catch the sunshine, turning plumetis and floral motifs into polka dots. In the meantime, black made the deflated incarnations all about proportions, or how the identical materials draped and moved.
Dramatic opera coats changed into austere and oversize attire; warped layers piled akimbo turned good-looking uneven off-the-shoulder numbers; colourful getups that wouldn’t look amiss on the “Starvation Video games’” Effie Trinket took on a cool punk vibe.
A key to the season was that the Dutch design duo’s need to experiment afresh with the concept of displaying the identical garment twice, a path they first explored with atomic mushroom silhouettes in 1998 and a number of other occasions since, however there was no unlocking a hard-and-fast interpretation.
Publish-show interviews changed into a Rorschach-test second. Was there a Gothic temper? Who had irritated the avians that the “Indignant Birds” assortment title referred to? Was there a hyperlink to the favored online game, a commentary on the state of the world?
Regardless of the reply turned out to be, the duo made a case for letting all of it hang around, superbly so.
