Consuming images that have been filtered through screens and all kinds of algorithms can lead you to believe six impossible things before breakfast, like Lewis Carroll’s White Queen.
This is certainly how Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren felt when they envisioned their spring couture collection, the starting point of which was seeing the world through our phones and the consequent disconnect between the images and the reality behind them.
Not only is there something very random about a juxtaposition that “goes from baking cakes to war, weather [emergency] to vacation destinations”, as Snoeren said, but it also gets us used to “seeing how it is possible [things that are] impossible,” Horsting explained before the show.
In their spring collection, therefore, they sought another disconnect: the cliché couture sentiment of fashion history and today. This took the form of an absurd take on stereotyped couture gowns, all embroidered bodices and full skirts in beautiful soft colors, to which “strange things happen,” they said.
Among those strange occurrences: a dress that seemed to fly off the body; one that fell forward horizontally as if model and outfit had collided at a right angle; a third that was completely upside down and resting on the hips, and another still that was two paces from its wearer.
All the impossibilities that “will end as an image but [are] not just an image, but also something real,” Horsting said.
To bring them to life, the duo harnessed another opposite pair, couture needle and thread augmented by 3D printing, which was used to construct the structures. Peeks inside the gowns, and the eminently normal first group, showed that beyond the acres of chiffon lay the very real technical mastery of the couple, who went from the principles of classic couture to figuring out how to balance with precision the dresses to make them. well, wearable so the models could glide gracefully across the room.
Viewing these Viktor & Rolf creations as mere products may be next to impossible, but seeing one of them as a front-row guest Doja Cat, sporting an unlikely moustache, is a very real possibility.
Source: news.google.com