2009 Wildlife fashion trends

designer clothes

You’d think that fashion and nature were diametrically opposed; for fashion demands artifice, control, the imposition of imperious demands on the natural form, at the very least, and, at worst, its destruction. Thus the closest that many designers come to nature is when they use dead animals for adornment – furs and snakeskins; alligator handbags and mink coats; as if covetous of a majesty that will always be denied to our poor, naked, hairless bodies. As Angela Carter wrote in her version of 'Beauty and the Beast’ – 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ – 'Lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty.’

So what, precisely, was Alexander McQueen’s message in the catwalk show of his spring collection, with a video backdrop of a revolving earth, and a stuffed lion beside the runway, flanked by a zoo of taxidermy? His programme notes mentioned Charles Darwin, the survival of the fittest and the damage caused by industrialisation; the clothes themselves used prints that drew on nature, tailored into strict hourglass silhouettes.

Thus, like an 18th-century landscape gardener, McQueen proved his mastery over the wild, pruning and training and shaping it as his own.

Christopher Kane’s spring collection was more Jungle Book than Origin of the Species; inspired, in his words, by 'Planet of the Apes, The Flintstones, Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, and Dian Fossey and her gorillas’. Hence a dress emblazoned with a roaring gorilla’s face, which drew applause from the fragrant fashion editors at Kane’s London Fashion Week show. And if you really want to get into the simian look, there’s an even scarier version of the frock with gorilla bicep sleeves.

source: newfashionnews.com

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