When you strip away much of the apparatus that has come to surround fashion shows, as many designers have done this season — the big, conspicuously expensive show sets, the enormous guest lists, the flashing bulbs bouncing off the celebrities front row — the clothes are left to stand on their own.
That was precisely what designer Jonathan Anderson was after when he erected a white cube on the magnificent grounds of the Château de Vincennes, a few miles east of Paris, for Loewe’s show on Friday morning. “You are forced to look at the clothing,” he explained.
Not that there weren’t celebrities — there were several, including Schitt’s Creek actors Catherine O’Hara and Dan Levy — but the set was simple, its whiteness punctuated by colourful waist-height cubes of confetti by the artist Lara Favaretto.
Through these, the models moved in simple white dresses (which were vintage) printed with blurred florals and what looked like a smudged black-and-white photocopy of a female nude, and silk evening dresses looped over metal spheres pinned below the collarbone. Their earnest elegance was lightened by quirky long-sleeve shirts and long shorts covered in big, overlapping feathers, and flat boots that pooled around the ankles like dropped trousers.
Anderson said he’d been thinking about “realities”, and how “in the room [the collection] looks like one thing, and then we have an audience online who sees it a different way”. For guests in the room, it was easy to see that the blurred dresses, inspired by the work of German artist Gerhard Richter, were printed that way; but online they gave the illusion of being out of focus, he…
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