Gaultier Spring HC 2008: Something scaley & wet...

[zalena]

I haven't paid much attention to fashion this year, but you know I never miss a Gaultier collection. His spring HC collection seems to have a mermaid theme. The collection starts out with masculine suits and then metamorphosizes, first blurring the stark outlines into something looser and more drapey (almost pajama like), then becoming dresses emphasizing the female shape, and finally incoporating 'scaley' shapes and textures, until his last gown features, yes, shells you-know-where.

It's a marvelous concept and I'm shocked it hasn't been done before: but Gaultier has always worked with fashion as it relates to the body. I'm thinking of his fall collection several years ago featuring fur and hair hats that worked as extensions of the models' bodies, almost as though they had grown there. Even his earlier bondage themes (think Madonna's cone-boobs, those were Gaultier) worked with the tension of the natural vs artificial body; though his boundaries were a lot clearer then. No one would mistake cone-boobs for the real thing.

These days his gowns seem to emerge as something that almost grows up around the body. I'm thinking of that marvelous floral dress on the plus sized model several springs ago that looked like she had suddenly started sprouting foliage; but in a sexy, and somewhat frightening way. And these dresses, with their odd details, a sort of scaley, sea-weedy, wet-look, one could almost imagine forming themselves around some water spirit as her idea of what humans wear...

Except this collection isn't about women emerging from the water, or the painful split of tail into legs that we've seen in so many adaptations of the Little Mermaid. This collection is about returning woman to the water. Taking her out of the masculine form and putting her into something more fluid and more primally feminine than the past decade years of '50s housewife nostalgia we've seen on the runways and in the stores.

Look for yourself:
http://www.elle.com/collections/12730/jean-paul-gaultier-fashion-show-spring-2008-haute-couture.html

For past coverage of fashion (mostly Gaultier) see my tags:
http://zalena.livejournal.com/tag/fashion

Comments

[averygoodun.livejournal.com]

I'm not a huge Gaultier fan, but this collection is fabulous! It really is about reclaiming sex as a feminine form.

[srotu27.livejournal.com]

Marginally related bit of outrage: through a clerical error of epic proportions, I'm getting Us Weekly (or rather, have been getting and believe I have stopped). I can't help myself--- I hate the magazine and what it stands for (it seems to me about normalizing an unnatural voyeuristic fascination with an unattainable, unnatural lifestyle), but I browse it when it comes to my house. They had a spread of the America's Next Top Model candidates for spring and remarked that one was a plus-sized model. She's a size 8. How wrong are we as a society that a size 8 is regarded as plus-sized. Do you know when I was last an 8? When I was 14 years old. Those who knew me in high school should be able to attest that, as a cheerleader, runner, and all-around insanely involved person, there wasn't much to spare on my size 12. It kills me what we tell ourselves is normal and healthy. Which is really neither here nor there to Gaultier--- sorry--- your post just made me think of it again.