Latticed bridge trusses and hazy streetscapes adorn the garments of fashion designer Mary Katrantzou’s Autumn Winter 2013 collection shown during London Fashion Week.
The angular shapes of the trusses are embossed onto leather and woven into lace to create repeating patterns.
Fabric is extended up from the bodice, flared out from the shoulders or exaggerated across the bust to create hard, architectural shapes.
In contrast, softer capes and dresses are draped in spirals around the body forming asymmetric layers of chiffon and silk.
Foggy streets and landscapes printed onto satin and silk are inspired by the black-and-white photography of Edward Steichen, Clarence White and Alfred Stieglitz.
More abstract prints look like leafless trees set against a dreary winter sky.
Subtle swathes of colour seep into some outfits and blend together like watercolour paintings.
Some outfits carry the same print throughout, whereas others mix simple tops with printed trousers or skirts.
Mary Katrantzou graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design with an MA in fashion textiles and won the Emerging Talent – Ready-to-wear award at the British Fashion Awards 2011.
The collection was shown during London Fashion Week last week, where Sister by Sibling presented a range of giant crocheted garments and accessories.
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Read on for more text from the designer:
Mary Kantrantzou Autumn Winter 2013
For autumn/winter 2013, Mary Katrantzou turns to landscape, inspired by the shadowy vistas of turn-of-the-century black-and-white photography of Edward Steichen, Clarence White and Alfred Stieglitz.
This isn’t nature – but a man’s view of nature, captured, refracted and ultimately distorted by the camera lens, fixed in black-and-white for eternity.
In a similar way, with Katrantzou’s aesthetic wizardry, all is seldom what it immediately seems. Her graphics blur reality with fantasy, re-engineering nature to frame the female body.
Pablo Picasso rinsed his paintings of colour to highlight the formality of structure and his obsessive interest in line and form. Colour was distraction.
In a similar search for purity, for autumn/winter 2013 Mary Katrantzou finds focus in a similar stripping-back, the collection revolving around a rainbow of monochrome, velvety black, soft grey and crisp white, all strictly-controlled.
Pattern, rather than print, is the focus of this collection. It’s pattern conveyed through the intricacy of intarsia knits, embroideries, jacquards and brocades, custom knit, woven and engineered to re-render a landscape across her clothes.
Lace is specially woven to mimic a latticed ‘Bridge’ design, while leather is embossed with graphics derived from Katrantzou’s prints.
Print, of course, is still present – it is Katrantzou’s leitmotif. For this collection, however, it is one part of a harmonious, multi-textured palette of effects, giving depth and vigour to the rigour of her designs.
Cotton embroidery is overprinted to give a blurred painterly mood, needle punched felt mimics the fade of black winter-stripped trees into a pale sky, sometimes embedded with Swarovski crystal.
Reversed brocade, when digitally printed, creates a blurred, holographic landscape. Colour flushed through the monochrome prints allows Katrantzou to invent her own landscapes, artificially engineered with the trickery of print.
The silhouette is linear – attenuated, elongated, elegant. For day, the silhouette is stark, architectural and austere, a symphony of angular lines focussed on the diagonal.
For night, those same shapes are reinterpreted as ghosts of their firmer selves in flowing organza, prints overlaid to create a hazy, misty optical illusion. The diagonal line becomes a spiral, a winding road meandering around the landscape of the woman’s body.
In Mary Katrantzou’s hands, even nature becomes a fabrication – a moment in time immortalised in cloth. This season, each garment is a world in its own right.
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by Mary Katrantzou appeared first on Dezeen.
