Whenever Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren take to the runway, the punchlines come in twists and layers. This outing was no exception: inside the gilded salons of the Westin hotel—where Yves Saint Laurent showed his collections for decades—the designers lifted a page from couture’s golden age by having the looks narrated. The twist? A one-size-fits-all description, in a silken voice generated by AI. The punchline: it was inspired by a Karl Lagerfeld quip from some 40 years ago: “I am like a computer, plugged into Chanel mode.”
Though the words were on loop, the collection was a deliberately divergent meditation of 24 looks, worked from some 900 meters of a single fabric. Here, too, there were layers of meaning: this Italian silk gazar by Ruffo Coli is a modern iteration of a fabric developed by Balenciaga in the 1960s. Though the duo has used it before—notably for their Blacklight collection of spring 1999—this time it became a platform for “a human interpretation of the endless possibilities of AI. Except that we are our own AI,” Horsting said before the show. Completing the thought, Snoeren added, “It was like a prompt, and then all these diverse silhouettes came out, but the codes are the same.”
With just three prompts—a beige trench, a white shirt, navy pants—the duo took a deep dive into the material, drawing on rigorous, old-school couture techniques to move from simple and minimalist into ever-more bold, baroque and extreme silhouettes, accessorized with custom brown satin Louboutins and vintage jewels from Droomfabriek de Groot de Jong in Amsterdam.
By way of an opener, a seemingly unfinished “outspoken” trench coat played on the fabric’s natural tendency to curl when cut on the bias, the designers explained. Further along, it turned up as a dress on a Victorian doll attached to a prim, tailored white shirt with buttons running down the back. That look was another punchline, culled from the designers’ sprawling collection of figurines (the dress returned in a life-sized iteration for the finale, neatly checking the Scarlett O’Hara trend that seems to be going around). There were cascades of bows and ruffles, a landslide of a trench with shoulders that rose well above the ears, and a new wrinkle the duo called “controlled crumple” that began with an early trench and later swelled into a froth.
Viewed on a screen—as from the front row—it will be difficult to grasp the details of craftsmanship here. But tech’s limitations are no match for Viktor Rolf clients and fans, who came out in droves today: They know intelligent couture when they see it.
