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There have been comments—little blasé moans, actually—flying around the Internet recently to the effect that we’re all about to go off print. There’s been so much colorful digitally printed wackery appearing in fashion over the past few years that it’s impossible to imagine anything exciting being done with it. Well, tell that to Mary Katrantzou, the girl whose single-minded creativity shifted digital printing into high gear when she was just out of Central Saint Martins in 2008. She calls it “painting with pixels.”
Being highly intelligent and two steps ahead of critical speculation, she changed direction this season, moving out of trompe l’oeil and into looser, simpler, but sparklingly sophisticated shapes. It’s all still printed or woven into patterns in fabric, though. And nuttily enough, her twin subjects for spring 2013 are postage stamps and outdated currency.
It ended up looking so good that Katrantzou will probably make bank with this collection. “I knew I had to jettison the corsetry and the bustles I did last season, and I knew I couldn’t go on with the trompe l’oeil,” she said backstage in a crush of senior international buyers and journalists who had sat spellbound at how she had lifted her game yet again.
It wasn’t just the placements of the stamp motifs, and the use of their serrated edges, and other borders drawn from philately, or from Greek key patterns and Asian geometric knots as decoration: It was the way they came printed on the flat, swingy planes of A-line dresses with deep inverted pleats, or narrow pants with boxy gilets, or an oversize shirt with curved tails. The stamp and money idea meant Katrantzou could work with pictorial content—exotic birds, plants, butterflies, and landscapes—but also play games with colorful, intricate graphics. You could see the hand and eye of a woman working as she engineers the lettering from bank notes (there were bits of deutsche marks, old pound notes, Maltese liri, drachmas) to broaden shoulders, narrow legs, and draw attention to the bust visually. There was nothing that is not expertly considered to be flattering.
Often, normal eyesight isn’t enough to understand how Katrantzou has created her effects—and it became more difficult than ever when she switched to from stamps to riffing on the calligraphy, watermarks, and foil used in banknotes for evening. Out came a beautiful dark blue pantsuit with a sheen in a specially woven banknote jacquard; then a pairing of a silvery tunic top and pants—impeccable. Then what looked like multicolored beading on simple knitted short-sleeved dresses, again printed with an inexplicable iridescence.
At the end, Katrantzou explained the lengths to which she and her team had gone to invent that technique. It involved consulting a local expert in stained-glass windows and then experimenting over and over again with printing on glass beads. The results were lovely, refreshing, wearable, and grown-up, from beginning to end. And there are many more simplified variations on the theme Katrantzou is saving to sell in Paris. Put it this way: Going by the ecstatic audience reaction as it spilled out into the gardens of Bedford Square, she’ll be minting money with this collection.
Being highly intelligent and two steps ahead of critical speculation, she changed direction this season, moving out of trompe l’oeil and into looser, simpler, but sparklingly sophisticated shapes. It’s all still printed or woven into patterns in fabric, though. And nuttily enough, her twin subjects for spring 2013 are postage stamps and outdated currency.
It ended up looking so good that Katrantzou will probably make bank with this collection. “I knew I had to jettison the corsetry and the bustles I did last season, and I knew I couldn’t go on with the trompe l’oeil,” she said backstage in a crush of senior international buyers and journalists who had sat spellbound at how she had lifted her game yet again.
It wasn’t just the placements of the stamp motifs, and the use of their serrated edges, and other borders drawn from philately, or from Greek key patterns and Asian geometric knots as decoration: It was the way they came printed on the flat, swingy planes of A-line dresses with deep inverted pleats, or narrow pants with boxy gilets, or an oversize shirt with curved tails. The stamp and money idea meant Katrantzou could work with pictorial content—exotic birds, plants, butterflies, and landscapes—but also play games with colorful, intricate graphics. You could see the hand and eye of a woman working as she engineers the lettering from bank notes (there were bits of deutsche marks, old pound notes, Maltese liri, drachmas) to broaden shoulders, narrow legs, and draw attention to the bust visually. There was nothing that is not expertly considered to be flattering.
Often, normal eyesight isn’t enough to understand how Katrantzou has created her effects—and it became more difficult than ever when she switched to from stamps to riffing on the calligraphy, watermarks, and foil used in banknotes for evening. Out came a beautiful dark blue pantsuit with a sheen in a specially woven banknote jacquard; then a pairing of a silvery tunic top and pants—impeccable. Then what looked like multicolored beading on simple knitted short-sleeved dresses, again printed with an inexplicable iridescence.
At the end, Katrantzou explained the lengths to which she and her team had gone to invent that technique. It involved consulting a local expert in stained-glass windows and then experimenting over and over again with printing on glass beads. The results were lovely, refreshing, wearable, and grown-up, from beginning to end. And there are many more simplified variations on the theme Katrantzou is saving to sell in Paris. Put it this way: Going by the ecstatic audience reaction as it spilled out into the gardens of Bedford Square, she’ll be minting money with this collection.
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