The Cutting Class

Junya Watanabe, SS12.

The Japanese designers seem to have a way of conjuring up new fantasy headwear each season and pairing it with delicate models and deadpan facial expressions. This season was no exception with Junya Watanabe displaying feather hair sculptures with flashes of unusual tones and hues to offset the floral repeats that embellished the garments. The use of the colours within the feathers echoed the off-kilter colour palettes that have been the norm for the last few seasons. These colours added a contemporary edge to simply draped floral dresses and trademark double breasted tailoring by throwing unexpected highlight colours into the mix.

Jean Paul Gaultier, Couture, AW11.

There are some designers who create clothes that have a great sense of movement, often through the sheer volume of fabric used in the garment or the amount of space between the body and the garment, or even through the lightness of the fabric that enhances the movements of the models.

It is one thing for garments to react to the movement of the body but quite another to manipulate and guarantee the perfect effect. There is a certain craft in the way that some couturiers will not leave fashion moments to chance. Not content to wait for just the right puff of wind to blow a skirt or jacket hem into a memorable position, they pre-empt the moment, carefully draping and supporting the fabric to create shapes that will look good all the time.

There were examples of this control in the recent couture collection for Autumn-Winter 2011, by Jean Paul Gaultier. From the carefully nipped waist of a scarlet leather coat, to the swirls of tiny beads encrusting another jacket, Gaultier had a way of building movement into his collection so that the clothes would have still felt full of life even if the models had been standing perfectly still. One particularly labour intensive example would have to be the use of feathers in varying sizes that crept up a jacket like fish scales, increasing in size as they reached the shoulders.

Note that this was also the collection with the inventive ballet shoes as seen in the post En Pointe Accessories at Jean Paul Gaultier».

Images from Vogue.co.uk».

One of the fundamental effects that clothing has is to identify and categorise people in the minds of everyone else around them. We can be very judgemental and often decide whether someone is “one of us” just by looking at them. It serves as one of our basic ways of aligning ourselves with others, a way of belonging to a certain tribe.

While some designers tend to beat to the drum of being on-trend, others have already cultivated their own communities and are even referencing it within their collections. In the recent Ann Demeulemeester, Rick Owens and Vivienne Westwood collections you feel that they are speaking in a language that their customers already know and understand, and if you are out of the group and don’t quite get it then it doesn’t really matter to them. They aren’t one size fits all aesthetics, and it would be a shame if they ever became that way because truly this is what is most powerful about these brands.

In the most straightforward symbolic terms there are references in these collections to being in the wild, of making your clothes from feathers and fur and using warpaint as part of your hunting garb. Both Owens and Demeulemeester seem to have supplied the gloves for handling large birds of prey. On the other hand the references are more mixed at Westwood, combinations of slogans and military references and a colourful mixture of cultural references, as though arming her models for a protest afterparty.

One thing that I find connects all three of these collections is that you get a sense that these clothes were actually made by the people walking the catwalk for them to wear themselves. These models do not appear to be the clothes horses of some other power but instead you can almost imagine that they had a part in the way that the clothes were made, as though the look that they are wearing is their individual version of the groups uniform, their own part of the whole aesthetic. I believe this is largely due to the styling which can appear suitably wild (Westwood and Demeulemeester) or suitable disciplined (Owens), as though they definitely all belong to a tribe or a cult of some kind, as though somewhere in the world there is a village full of Owenites who all walk around with their layered clothing and uniformed red lips performing daily rituals and mundane chores.

The use of colour even seems like it could be a symbol of hierarchy in the group. Maybe you only get to wear the red Demeulemeester fur or the black Owen wings if you are the most powerful high priestess in your village. And once these pieces are out in the world this is how they will probably be viewed afterall, certain pieces of clothing or accessories will mean nothing to some people but to others of the same cult, they will be like a secret handshake.

Ann Demeulemeester, AW11.

Rick Owens, AW11.

Vivienne Westwood, AW11.

Catwalk images from Vogue.co.uk. Photographs by Irving Penn, from 221.270PhotoBlog» and OneFineThread».