There is one main failure in the fashion industry at the moment - most houses do not explore or push experimental techniques and designs further. This is mainly due to the fast rhythms of fashion that prompt a lot of designers to keep on producing one collection after the next, without exploring one idea, concept or material further, trying to discover all the possibilities that particular textile or technique may offer them.
This is not the case, though, at Anrealage's where designer Kunihiko Morinaga has been carrying out for a while experiments along the shadow/light themes employing ultraviolet reactive fabrics.
Showcased at the beginning of Paris Fashion Week, Anrealage's Autumn/Winter 2015 collection featured a series of models with bulbous charcoal helmet-like headdresses and with faces and hands covered in a matte black paint.
They may have been coming out of a mine, they maybe have been evil aliens landed on our planet with very bad intentions, or they could have been the scarier zombies of charred corpses burnt out in an apocalyptic fire.
Whatever they were meant to be, they were clad in long black skirts (though pants also made an appearance) matched with jackets characterised by a round and circular cocooning silhouette. When light shone on the clothes, the garments would morph, revealing a white circular spot.
At the beginning of the show the black with white circles projected across the chest prevailed, but, (luckily) after a while, repetition led to variation with severe suits giving way to spherical thick knits and then mutating into something more entertaining, from tartans and checks to floral and tapestry-like patterns (you can see the effect pretty well also on Anrealage's backstage pictures posted on the label's Facebook page).
The show closed with mesmerising white polkadots à la Yayoi Kusama that appeared on blue and red backgrounds when the black garments were hit by lights and disappeared again when the models stepped away from the main spotlights.
The collection may have had a rather simplistic title - "Light", the antithesis of Anrealage's Spring/Summer 2015 collection, entitled "Shadow" - and be based around an idea - light reactive fabrics - that, as seen in a previous post, is not entirely new as it had originally appeared in the '80s in Cinzia Ruggeri's designs.
Besides, opposites such as light/darkness or light/shadows are popular contrasts in fashion, so they aren't so innovative, and, talking about innovation, well, many designs included in this collection also seemed to be based around the same softly sculpted silhouette, while in other cases like the chunky knits, the spotlight effect was only simulated or recreated via holes or embroidered motifs.
Yet the collection looked all the same interesting for a few reasons: presentation-wise Kunihiko Morinaga's managed to reunite concept, craft and technology in a show marked by slow rhythms that allowed viewers to have a good look at the garments and grasp the final meaning of the collection - the fact that, sometimes, what lurks in the darkness can be quite beautiful and visually pleasant rather than scary and upsetting.
The designs also seemed to suggest a new form of camouflage in fashion: people opting for Anrealage's black pieces may disappear in an ordinary crowd wearing the same colour of clothes, but they will also look extremely different from everybody else when hit by a spotlight that will reveal the true and exuberant nature of the wearer (we can maybe talk in this case about behavioural garments that interact with the space surrounding the wearer).
Last but not least, the real protagonist of this collection remains the fabric and that's something to praise: as the fashion industry seems too focused on fancy presentations and vapid celebrities in the front row, a reshift towards the importance of textiles and experimental fabrics is always a breath of fresh air.
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