A sleepy street in London’s Earls Court with nary anyone in sight, a darkened church with long panels of canvas obscuring its walls — it could have been the premise for a Victorian horror novel.
Completing the impression was Paolo Carzana’s latest effort, rife with models that looked like shrouded statues coming to life in the confines of Saint Cuthbert’s, a listed 19th-century church prized for its rich Arts and Crafts decor.
As is his wont, the Welsh designer sent out superpositions of shredded filmy knits, barely there woven textiles and fraying seams that curved and stretched as they encountered the human form. Here and there, openings gave flashes of an inner thigh or the curve of a hip.
One could argue that Carzana’s work harkened to a particularly rich strand of European painting from the 16th and 17th centuries, where artists such as Spain’s Bartolomé Esteban Murillo made ordinary people into subjects in their own right instead of background characters to portraits of the powerful.
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There were great amounts of handcraft and textures in Carzana’s lineup, making for beautiful sculptural imagery. But ultimately, the commercial viability of the ensemble remained shrouded in mystery.
