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fakingfashion:

by Hamish Bowles 

“Riccardo Tisci calls this his “very sparkle collection,” explaining that “for seven years I urged the ateliers to be experimental,” but now he wanted them to explore the possibilities of more conventional haute couture embellishments.

Looking to the the twenties and thirties—however “not as costume, but as a graphic”—Tisci proved that he could take a waterfall of crystals, pearlescent sequins, and caviar beads and weld them firmly to his own powerful, far from conventional, vision of a woman.

Tisci turned not to the frolicking Gatsby romance of the Deco era, but instead to Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, and his fellow filmmaker Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 proto sci-fi classic Aelita (films which he credits as harbingers of techno music), for inspiration. 

His dresses curve the body in odeonesque seams, but some of those are defined with arcing zippers, and their bodices wither to reveal singlets in the finest silk jersey, piped in nappa. Crocodile skin was cut scale by scale, carefully numbered, and then reassembled in correct formation and embroidered on fine silk tulle to create a sinuous evening dress that caresses the body (a process that takes 350 hours), while crocodile swallow-tailed jackets are embellished with three dimensional Soviet stars (also scattered in tone-on-tone relief on a solid raven’s-wing sequin dress) and angelic wings, miraculously crafted from the same unyielding material. Liquid silk satin dresses are washed with rivulets of crystal and white opaque beads, their hems weighted with rhinestone raindrops.” VOGUE.COM

(via confoosedalways)