The saying "I ve become part of the furniture" sprang to mind at Hussein Chalayan s show. Not that it meant you could be overlooked while wearing his clothes: How could you be, in a jacket whose rolled, stuffed-leather collar was a chunk of padding, lifted directly from a gentlemen s club armchair? This opening image, however, turned out not to be an overture to a presentation of disconcerting conceptualism: Chalayan has grown out of that. His collection still showed its intellectual roots, but it was full of things that a smart woman will want to wear this fall.
Chalayan aficionados know that he s incorporated parts of fighter-plane seats, wooden coffee tables, and carpets into clothes before. This time, however, he abstracted his comfortable upholstery components—and the polished surfaces of Victorian sideboards—into beautiful clothes that don t demand too much cerebral heavy lifting. Those exaggerated collars, for a start, happen to interlock neatly with the season s obsession with swathed, built-up necklines; the short, waisted coats below them are also sharply in step with fashion. Add to that Chalayan s double-wedge boots (whose soles suggested the rubber stops of a computer desk) and his use of plush velvet quilting and nail-head studding: all personal interpretations of current trends.
In the end, what matters is that Chalayan s methodology can produce such right-on silhouettes as a leather-collared tweed blouson with a pleated mini-kilt, or his light-handed, pretty dress made of paneled, wood-grain-printed silk. Definitely not designed for women who want to blend into the domestic background.
