FashionFame

Balenciaga’s Nicolas Ghesquière went on a different path at Paris prêt-à-porter season unleashing a wild, tribal potpourri of fluoro-color, vintage print, fabric and accessories. He reclaimed beat of street athleticism with hoodie, done here as a highly structured paneled leather vest; complex tanks; skinny, vertically patch-worked jeans; and sporty kilts. Ghesquière said that he wanted to do something urban for this collection, showing no more history references.

Each and every silhouette, garment, and tubular-ankled, open-toed boot presented in this spring/sumer 2010 collection was a unique meld of futuristic technique and art craftsmanship. Clothes were among the most labor-intensive, he has ever shown for the brand, mixing hand-woven leather, silk, and ostrich-skin, with nylon, techno-materials, pressure-printed jersey and 3-D ‘foam’.

(Click on images to enlarge)

Ankle sections of boots were either hand-loomed fabric or a meltdown of white, blue, and green strips of leather, laser-compressed into a striped amalgam, giving a toy hint to the shoes. Models’ makeup was like ‘warpaint’, with flashes of orange, neon pink, yellow and blue around their eyes. Their wrists were twined with silver ‘fangs’, tied with leather thongs. Overall silhouette was short, bold and dramatic.

The show ended with minute but mind-blowing latticework skirts that quivered like porcupine quills, flashing shots of maroon and green in movement. That kind of work can’t be reproduced anywhere else but in this house, and if there’s still an argument for high fashion versus low, this is one of the sturdy and strongest defenses that exists.

No Comments