Women's Ready-to-wear
Spring/Summer
“If I think of Africa, I see an album of photographs taken in black and white and then scanned… profiles and shapes, sensual because they are elementary, provocative because they are bare, voluminous and opulent yet composed of apparent rags, which I translated into the noblest of materials: silk gazar, iridescent shantung, double taffeta, quadruple organza – so that everything might be light yet at the same time elaborate. The designs have the force of tattoos that underline the figure, signs of seduction mingling with body painting. Jewellery becomes clothing; clothing becomes jewellery that adorns the body, reaching the very roots of line and decoration. With a magic vibrating with unprecedented reflections”.
Gianfranco Ferré
2001
In a sumptuous and primitive manner, utterly pure and eccentric, shantung skirts resemble liquorice cones, where strategic gathers create a sequence of flounces. Sections of dense grosgrain embroidery, assembled together, transform into surprising dresses. Eccentric mixes of styles, sublime touches of tribal elegance: the jute-and-silk duster with woven python shoes and a hand-painted heel; the couture jacket in silk houndstooth over a fringed mesh skirt encrusted with coral; the impeccable suit with balloon sleeves.
Cascades of coral necklaces cover the bust and fall to form a micro-dress or intertwine with leather thongs. Stones and corals trace jewellery integrated into garments through filigree embroideries on black tulle. Coral appears again, fragmented, while black beads reinvent tweed in a trompe-l’œil T-shirt – a second skin. Worked straw turns red. Gold blends with red to ennoble the colour. White returns insistently – lime, chalk, eggshell – together with black, which, once again paired with white, draws body prints, talismanic motifs, ethno-tattoos. Madagascar silk madras gleams in burgundy, midnight blue and antique gold.
Excerpts from the collection press release
Women's Ready-to-wear
Fall/Winter
“There is a sense of the classic, yet with a taste for risk and for an accelerated pace of life. There is the definition of a new opulence that does not express itself through precious embroideries, but through the contrast of daring materials and the sublimation of technological ones. There is a deliberate blend of masculine and hyper-feminine, a rebellious, gleaming mixture that takes me back to the golden years of rock – David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop. To the great tradition of British dress, with tailcoats, dinner jackets and postilion coats, overturned by shiny fabrics, unusual materials, contradictory cloths… a luxurious sense of extravagance surfaces even where garments seem to have the most traditional origins”.
Gianfranco Ferré
2001
For this reason, severe flannel is treated like denim, contradicted by linings, edges and trompe-l’œil pockets in precious silver fox. Jeans are transformed into magical encrustations of tartan brocade, skirts into soft sheaths of mohair. The effect culminates in plasticised tweed jackets sprayed with iridescent crystals and in coats with metallic embroideries on silver brocade fabrics – à la Ziggy Stardust.
For evening – light, ethereal, frothy – dresses with, so to speak, natural tails. Myriads of overlapping layers, weightless; skirts in chiffon gores; bouquet tops formed from small organza handkerchiefs stitched densely together; inlays that appear to be monkey fur but are in fact born from the crossing of lapin and kidassia. Energising mixes with leather, studs and cuissard boots in satin or stretch fustian, almost one with the dress, sheathing the leg like a stocking and lending it extraordinary length.
Excerpts from the collection press release
