The Walk Through at Marios Schwab
In a season thus far of designers playing it profoundly safe, it was left to Marios Schwab to inject some much-needed adrenaline into an otherwise atrophied London Fashion Weak (sic). And what adrenaline. Schwab's show was tough. Hard. Aggressive. And overwhelmingly, sensationally sexual: please note, sexual, not sexy. They are two very very different things. Schwab offered a vision of modern woman as both predator and prey, his models stalking the runway in animal-hide and draped fabric slit and sliced open to reveal the flesh, hair greased back, eyes blackened, teeth bared. He talked about seeing clothing as jewellery, a form of adornment that interacts fundamentally with the body rather than merely housing it. Schwab has referenced this before: the metal-panelled creations that marked his debut were always intended in this fashion, but this season he returned to the idea with added gusto. Inspired by the ancient Greek chiton, simple rectangles of cloth strapped against the body to give the dress shape and to reveal the form beneath, Schwab drew a natural allusion between this approach and the work of Christo, whose wrapped monuments in some way emphasise and exaggerate the physicality beneath their sutured cloth outer. Accordingly, dresses were drawn taut against the form with electroplated or jewelled braid, bound at the ankles or sides with metal or coiled entirely from crystal-strewn rope, mirroring and developing the extremely constrained silhouettes he offered last season. In contrast to the restriction of that show, fabric flowed freely around the body in motion, opening windows onto the skin beneath, pulled close, then released. Other garments were printed with the imagery of drapery, devised in a continuing collaboration with the artist Tom Gallant and used to animate the otherwise flat fabric plane on a far wider - and certainly more accessible - range of garments than Schwab has previously shown. Indeed, if there was any criticism of this collection, it was that it often veered into the commercial: but then again Schwab's commerce is different to that proferred by many (or even any) other designer. His commerce is anything but brainless - unwieldly through it may sound, his is the antithesis of the anti-intellectual approach that has gripping so many of lat. As a consequence, any money spent on his painstakingly-wrought creations is money well spent. Assured, focussed and quietly, subtly thrilling. It's going to sell, sell, sell.
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