"I was thinking of the ski world, and the scuba world," said Riccardo Tisci. "And the colors of the Bauhaus." True, his collection incorporated snowflake-patterned knits; neoprene diving fabric; and black, red, and beige as a color code. But the way he melded those materials into his collection spoke more of this Fall s reworking of the aesthetics of the nineties, personalized with Tisci s taste for high-drama Parisian glamour. Sporty piste- cum surfwear this definitely was not.
A better way of looking at it was as one of the season s rechannelings of the work of Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela, two towering heroes of modern fashion design whose retirement from the scene has left a gaping hole in women s wardrobes. Tisci s tailoring, like Phoebe Philo s at Celine, is a way of filling that gap with sharp camel coats, tuxedo suits, and lean black pants. In Tisci s case, it s also accompanied by tape-bound throats; red glitter gloves, bags, and lips; and sexy workings of scarlet, black, and nude lace. That s all fully in line with his own gothic taste but also reminiscent of Margiela s styling, back in the long-lost day when "edgy" was the buzzword of the nineties.
The scuba-ski dynamic meant traditional alpine patterns reengineered into formfitting bodysuits, sunk into neoprene lower garments that unfurled at the waist by means of zippers (the look happens to cross-reference with a section of Nicolas Ghesquière s collection this Fall). For evening, the fold-down device was transposed to inform the shape of black velvet and satin evening shifts and tunics. To end with, Tisci returned to working with feathers—a feature he s made his own in his couture collections over several seasons. Last in the line: a puff of white ostrich on an organza T-shirt, paired with narrow black pants, poetically trailing a pair of diaphanous "wings" as it exited. It was quite beautiful—and then again, in spirit, inescapably Helmut Lang.
