Spring/Summer 2016: denimwear celebrates the dynamic of opposites
Hidden in the heart of innocence, childhood, playfulness, mischief coexist with rational, deconstructionist, brainy, postmodern styles. The seduction of bare skin clashes with the mystery of the hidden body and of entirely conceptual architectures, miles away from natural anatomy. From the very best catwalks and targeting only the very few, the denim for the near future privileges stylistic virtuosity and flights of fancy of designing and cutting in the commingling of craft skills and industrial prowess.
We are talking about Ashish, a brand that constantly make us marvel at the nonchalance with which it treats jeanswear. This time, by featuring a style sometimes tinged with childhood nostalgia: little denim dresses with big cut-out hearts with red edges which leave not much space space to imagination as they reveal most of the body of the wearer. In keeping with this trend, which I would call “childish fairytale”, also some pieces by I’M Isola Marras, Alexander McQueen, Holly Fulton. Marras dives into memories of old lace and remembrances of yesteryear with very feminine denim dresses decorated with ruffles and embroideries in perfect grandmother style. An almost artistic college work of iconographic stereotypical elements and poetic emblems of lush summer nature for wide loose fit little dresses.
A similar approach in the use of precious appliqués, stitching, embroideries in fabulous bustier by Alexander McQueen with vaguely art deco floral decorations worn with threadbare jeans, emptied along the whole entire length of the leg, and similarly decorated sabots. For her part, the British Holly Fulton develops a more folk iconography using the same tools.Now the opposite trend: a rationalism made of shrewd de-structuring and deconstructing that make rigour coexists with imagination. An approach that characterises the collections by Ports 1961, Kenzo, Chloé, Vector, Marques’Almeida.
Let’s see how. California and the dear old Far West inspired Ports 1961 denim shirts and jackets with a clean, subtly erotic twist capable of skilfully using denim fabrics in contrasting light colours or deep indigo. A rigour that nods to trendiness. The denimwear by Kenzo instead waivers any vanity to go straight to a pure streamlined approach where the juxtaposition of different horizontal washes provides, by itself, the magic of style.
A similar streamlined footprint, but with a different emotional mood, is apparent in the Chloé collection with a quintessential, purified, newly romantic indigo dress alongside a suit with boxy jacket and wide trousers. While Marques’Almeida projects feminine archetypes as flamenco ruffles into the future, Hood by Air and Vector invent a new anatomy, born from deconstructivism and from the reinvention of the volumes and shapes of the human body.
