Fashionable Furnishings

 

 

A rising star on the runway for two years now, Mary Katrantzou’s Ceci n’est pas une chambre collection for SS11 was quite literally picture perfect. Images scanned straight from the pages of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors were digitally printed in all their high-life luxury upon a parade of dresses, capturing crystal-clear swimming pools, sprawling gardens and palatial parlours in pleasingly polite pastels of baby pink, mint and duck-egg blue. 

Simply put, the concept was just so…clever. Where photography had flattened the architecture into two dimensions, trompe l’oeil prints played at bringing it back to life. But there's more! Katrantzou then took things full circle, decorating her dresses with physical furnishings - candelabra necklaces, billowing chiffon curtains and, best of all, structured skirts modelled on the most kitsch lampshades you’re likely to find outside of the designer’s native Greece. 

Such hyperrealism isn’t just art for art’s sake though – much like its inspiration, René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Katrantzou’s re-imagined interiors cast a fresh eye over familiar objects and play with our perceptions of them. Seventies soft furnishings are suddenly seen as objects of beauty, and surprisingly wearable to boot. A room of one’s own? If only...

Strange Fruits

Fashion is a strange fruit, straddling a strange dichotomy. It prescribes what people should wear whilst celebrating personal expression: clothes are at once a reflection of self and a reflection of season. But when it all boils down to it, which is it really? As February’s issues of Vogue, Elle and Harper’s thud softly through letterboxes this week, stacked full of SS11 trend guides, does studying them signal an act of individual interest or one of sheep-like compliance? 

Skeptics seize upon the latter description, scorning seasonal shifts in what is considered stylish as the workings of a mob mentality. Yet fashion insiders have always insisted upon the former, fashion as self-expression, adamant that what they wear is never anything but personal preference. Alexa Chung declares, “I’m not very good with trends. I don’t really know what’s in or out.” But with such pledges of non-allegiance, of unaffected originality in the face of current fashions, where can trends ever come into the equation?

Herein lies what it means to be fashionable today – it’s the trick of being both seen and unseen, to become a part of the crowd whilst at the same time setting oneself apart from it. Chung slips on a new-season Christopher Kane dress, aligning herself with those who can recognise the designer and trend it belongs to, but then diverts the look from its expected editorial direction with a personal twist, a battered men's briefcase or a grandma knit. This roundabout route is the road to fashion itself: an insiders-outsiders club of non-conformity, where entry begins with a trend and ends with the individual. We may all start in the same place each season, with the same magazines and shows and clothes, but where we might end up is a different, far-reaching matter entirely. 

So as a little inspiration for your own individual mapping of the coming season, take a look at these gems from the legendary Japanese street-style magazine, Fruits. Shot by Shoichi Aoki throughout the ‘90s, the resulting book, also called Fruits, is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful, and one which shows that caring about fashion is never about following, and always about having fun: sheep we are most definitely not. 

 

 

 

Theyskens' Theory

 

 

 

 

Impossibly flat stomachs slanted skywards, naval-grazing T-shirts draped just so and a blissful blank canvas of clothes to choose from. Could anything be more appealing after a month of so much excess? Although minimalism was already established as one of AW10’s most coveted looks, Olivier Theyskens’ debut collection as Artistic Director of Theory somehow manages to make the trend that much cooler for SS11. It’s less elegant, more urban, and a whole lot more wearable than autumn’s pristine palette and don’t-touch-me tailoring. You could take a ride on the Tube in those perfectly slouched pants without last season's forensic fear of dirtying your just-dry-cleaned camel coat. It isn’t loud, but it’s certainly a collection that Theyskens should be very proud of. I’ll be having one of everything, please.