The first bite is taken with the eye; so say the Japanese about food. In fashion, that might translate into the impression generated by a designer s invitation. Ann Demeulemeester s was an expensive envelope, no address. The details of the show were printed on the inside flap. Totally interior. Just like the clothes, which were, according to Demeulemeester, all about a woman whose instinctive, utterly natural eccentricity inevitably finds outward expression in the way she dresses.
Something about that particular scenario suggested Sunset Boulevard, and there was indeed a Hollywood Gothic something in Demeulemeester s extraordinary flocking effects, spread across jackets and dresses, crawling up tulle-clad legs. Demeulemeester s woman has often been a warrior, but here you imagined a room with thick velvet curtains closed against the daylight, in which a creature of the night would languidly sprawl in poetic layers of flocked silk. Should she be compelled to venture into the outside world, it would be in a long, filmy skirt with a decorous pelmet underlay. And, in the interests of communicating her fuck-you eccentricity to the humans whose paths she d cross, what more would she need than one of Ann s wild-is-the-wind neu-wimples?
