Marchesa gowns are the stuff of fairy tales, and Spring 2019 looked like an actual storybook. Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig usually show their collections on the runway or in a straightforward lookbook shoot, and neither format tends to communicate a particular mood or setting. The dresses certainly speak for themselves, but Spring was a nice departure. They took their gowns outside of Manhattan to an estate with a dense, overgrown forest, so the results feel like something out of Sleeping Beauty—or maybe a Renaissance painting.
Many of the gowns came with gilded, hand-painted butterfly motifs or cascading ruffles to mimic wings, which looked particularly pretty among the ivy and giant oaks. A sparkling blush and lavender illusion-tulle gown had more of an abstract, blown-up version of the pattern in iridescent crystals, plus a single draped sleeve—a subtler suggestion of the wing’s shape. Other dresses came with weightless, hand-pleated, and hand-curled ruffles, which seemed to float in midair.
Chapman and Craig’s loose inspiration for it all was a “desert mirage,” somewhat at odds with their enchanted-forest setting. Ultimately, though, their clothes require little in the way of explanation or themes; most women who flip through these images (or are lucky enough to wear a Marchesa gown) rely on Marchesa simply to feel something: transported, inspired, and, yes, maybe a little bit like a princess.
