07/10/2009

Alexander McQueen SS10 Paris

PLATO'S ATLANTIS

In the interview before the show with Alexander McQueen, the designer stated his purpose for placing the show live online. He admitted enjoying collaborations with SHOWstudio, and also claimed that he wanted the show to be pure to the audience, to be seen through their own eyes rather than the eyes of the commercial industry and media.
He'd found that fashion is a form of entertainment, and so should be seen in that way.
So I'm not going to bring you any reports from other journalists from Vogue.com or Hilary Alexander, but rather I'm going to give you my own interpretation of the show.

The show began with a naked woman lying on the sand with many snakes crawling over her torso and breasts. It was very erotic to watch, and potentially fatal with the numerous amounts of snakes around her. The flashes of black flowing over her meant that she wasn't intended to be viewed constantly, and so I felt like a voyeur.

In front of the screen was the catwalk, although it wasn't much of a runway, more like an open exhibition space with two large objects on tracks splitting up the ground. It wasn't until they started moving that they began to look like the car painters from his Spring Summer 1999 collection. But then the screen began to show the front row, and we realised that on the end of each of these machines was not paint guns, but cameras.

Although occasionally the screen would show the machine's camera, the images were usually from still set cameras set on the outskirts of the catwalk ground. The first dress to arrive resembled the first video, with snake prints rather than skin creating psychedelic patterns across a lampshade skirt and fully covered upper body. The hair made her look as though she were a character out of Star Trek, with a mythical theme to the whole show.

As she continued down the catwalk, I realised that her shoes reminded me of something... those ballerina shoes with heels, only they were less chunky. No doubt underneath the bulbous front her feet were safely in position, as if in a normal shoe. The height, however, was immense, and some models had trouble. Not as much trouble as the Burberry shoes seem to give, and definitely more walkable than the new Nina Ricci shoes that have come out this season.


The printed fabrics were a definite trend within the McQueen Spring Summer 2010, resembling moss and earth to begin with, then becoming more unnatural in colour and fabric. The shapes were mainly short skirts that flared out like tutus, but with a catsuit style upper body.
Shoes resembled willow and pantaloons reminded me of the Fawn in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Black appeared on three models only, with a mixture of blues, whites and earthy browns controlling the colour palette. After the models had circulated the machines, they all came out again, and you realised how much trouble McQueen had to go through in casting. There probably wasn't one dress change at all backstage, and so the models would have been very calm, worried only about whether they were going to fall or not.


A beautiful collection full of mythical creatures, space martians and underwater goddesses.

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