London Fashion week is here and the town is filled with willowy models, demanding Fashionistas, photographers with sore feet and OTT bloggers. I will be reporting from London Fashion Weekend myself since Dior sent my invite to the wrong address, and someone obviously stole my Matthew Williamson invite and Stella, poor sweetheart, was too jealous of my personal glamour to invite me.
In the meantime I thought I'd look at one of the things I find most interesting about LFW - the staging of the collections.
My favourite staging recently has been done by Dior who has used poles to create dramatic modern settings that cross the line between builder's scaffolding and Tron for their Esprit Tokyo show in December.
Chanel, another of my favourites for staging, went for a glasshouse effect where tropical flowers bloomed matching the shades the models wore for their Spring/Summer 2015 show.
Here's the legend himself talking about the staging and the collection.
And here's a more fun and less delicate version in stark contrast - making a political statement for women's empowerment in a staging that looked like the beautiful streets of Paris.
In the meantime I thought I'd look at one of the things I find most interesting about LFW - the staging of the collections.
My favourite staging recently has been done by Dior who has used poles to create dramatic modern settings that cross the line between builder's scaffolding and Tron for their Esprit Tokyo show in December.
See what I mean?
Then for their Spring Summer 2015 Haute Couture Show they referenced a David Bowie lyric (points Dior, points) "Moonage daydream" - interpreting it as an "alien journey through the past’s ideas of the future to reach the point of today". The collection displayed was one that mixed time periods and uses decorative elements in a structural way:
"Intricate, tour-de-force appliqued pleating heightens this sense of the decorative becoming the architecturally structured in the collection... The typical Dior ‘femme fleur’ is subverted and liberated in the collection. Made unfamiliar, futuristic, graphic and decisive in her encrusted and dripping lace florals, tattoo body suits and hyper-real plastic blossom prints, she is at once exquisitely decorated and disruptive in her mirrored, octagonal terrain of the show venue. I wanted that feeling of a sensory overload both in the collection and in the venue for the show,” explains Raf Simons. “Something encrusted and bejewelled alongside the shock of bright colour and sensuality in the clothing with an architectural structure and interior that has a similarly disorientating feeling; somewhere you cannot quite place where you are, or which period of time you are in.”
And here's a more fun and less delicate version in stark contrast - making a political statement for women's empowerment in a staging that looked like the beautiful streets of Paris.
In each example the staging helps to tell the story of the collection just as much as the designs the models wear - whether it's a surreal moorage daydream of time and place, a tropical garden or the revolutionary streets of Paris.
Let's see how LFW does it this week. I can't wait :)
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