Sunday, September 11, 2011

Altuzarra S2012: A question of taste

It's never good when even the biggest girls on the runway can't make the clothes look like, well, great clothes. In this instance they (the big girls) didn't even look like they could muster the interest to try. They looked bored. Last season it was the winter coat I wore to high school with the nasty road kill trimmed hood, or at least a very exact replica of that coat which I can't seem to locate and this spring it's tired windbreakers, anoraks and poorly cut coats over depressing bits of this and that. The python, leather and stretch collages of 2 seasons ago have developed into Hawaiian printed cotton, poplin and silk collages for this season. It looks like a lateral move to me and one that's headed perilously away from center stage. These sartorial statements land like cannonballs in the shallow end of the pool. Big splashes as far as the press goes and we the audience just get soaked on the sidelines. I looked closely at the clothes, especially the coats and outerwear that everyone makes so much fuss over. The construction is perfunctory, the leather mixed with cloth looks like a battle lost on both sides and the silhouette is like the artistry of a sloper without nuance, forget poetry. Its a lot of hard doing all it can to appear soft. Knowing that much of what he makes including these samples is done off site it's not surprising that it all looks so vague. This is a feast cooked up by a committee of technicians. What good is a made in Italy label when you had little or nothing to do with the process beyond a sketch and some specs? Fitting the clothes on models a day before the show is not the same as making the samples in your own studio and working out the kinks. I will cool my jets and leave the decision up to you. To me, at the end of the day it's a question of taste.

2 comments:

spirou said...

La Bibine again, thrift store picking, dumpster diving fashion. My house keeper would dress like that in the 80's, the parrot look, I bought her uniforms... So chic !

Anonymous said...

This collection looks incredibly cheap, not only in style but fabrication. Gross!