Friday, May 5, 2017

Viktor & Rolf Fall/Winter Haute Couture 2015-2016.

Weds. 07/08/2015.





Viktor & Rolf Fall/Winter Haute Couture 2015-2016.

Fashion as Art? Art as Fashion?

Painting as Sculpture? Sculpture as Painting?

Quixotic questions to be asked and not quite fully answered at the 2015-2016 Fall/Winter Viktor & Rolf Haute Couture show. These ideas were posited and postulated to an ephemerally brilliant degree by Viktor Horsting and his partner Rolf Snoeren in a collection that dazzled the mind and the taxed it as well, ever so subtly. Coming on the heels of the cessation of their RTW line as so they could focus on their quirky, arty, couture label, that move seemed to concentrate their genius into one of the most poignant and deeply moving fashion shows I've ever seen. There wasn't much going on outside of the IdeƩ Fixe of transmogrifying what started out as wearable sculpture into real, in the moment, paintings that Horsting and Snoeren carefully draped and hung on the extensive back wall of their runway. Not every piece was a mutable object to be reworked from one state unto another, but they didn't have to be... The high-minded theorems presented here were about the exact nature of when does, and more acutely, CAN fashion, transgress into being ART? It's a big and loaded question that has been traversed by greater minds than mine and I am not really sure Horsting and Snoeren appropriately answered that question. I don't think their point was to, in all actuality.

Their point was more, to my imagining, to pose the question and give a demonstration on how to some way, come to the answer. Were these wearable "Clothes", outside of the daintily decorated Chambray smocks the models wore under their laboriously worked "Sculptures" (Which by the way, were the epitome of the opposite of couture)... Well, not exactly. Yet, the wondrous garments that weighed them down in the most magnificent of ways on top of or enrobing those smocks (Really, how some of those girls navigated some of the truly gargantuan pieces they were cloaked in is a triumph in and of itself, let alone the outlandishly taxing construction of said pieces!) were the story to be seen and experienced. Had Horsting and Snoeren spent one minute more on the underpieces, it would have worked against the theme that was being debated.

Should I talk about the clothes... Alright. They were unwearable to an almost lunatic caliber. Yet, had not the Belgian duo did so much to the clothes (those weighty wooden frames, C'MON!) the clothes would have had an almost Fairy-Tale like allure, and would have been fantastical, yes, but easily wearable in the context of Couture. Though, was that really anything that was of interest to Horsting and Snoeren? In the end, It doesn't matter. When all was said and done, the viewers were transported for a few brief minutes into a world where it seemed all was possible, that one could perhaps stroll into the Museum of Modern Art, gaily lift Van Gogh's "Starry Night" off the wall and wear it as a piece of clothing. That's not ever really going to happen, but in Viktor & Rolf's heads, It already did! Sort of.



That's All.





Bye4Now!

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