One might assume that with a body of work stretching from couture to perfume and everything in between over the course of three decades, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have done it all and then some.
“When we started thinking about the season, the image of a feather came to mind — I don’t know why,” Snoeren said backstage after their fall couture show. “Perhaps feathers, a bird [flying], freedom. There’s all of that, but it’s also one of the tropes of couture, and we never did anything with feathers.”
That’s been amply addressed, given there were some 11,500 of them — without counting further feathered headpieces designed by Stephen Jones — packed into sleeves, collars, petticoats and coattails. They appeared to be so plentiful they spilled from seams in colorful curlicues.
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And to give a sense of why this was even more impressive than it sounds: they weren’t natural feathers. Each was individually cut from gossamer fabric and shaped to look eerily like the real deal. The British milliner likewise crafted his from tulle or colorful polymer sheets.
That accounted for 50 percent of the collection. Each of these 15 sculpturally stuffed silhouettes came with a twin, identical in cut and material but devoid of any stuffing, experiments that emerged during fitting, Horsting said.
Side by side on the runway, they couldn’t have looked more different.
Volume gave space for details to come to the fore, highlighted by the colorful padding, making satins and sequins catch the light, turning plumetis and floral motifs into polka dots. Meanwhile, black made the deflated incarnations all about proportions, or how the same fabrics draped and moved.
Dramatic opera coats turned into austere and oversize dresses; warped layers piled akimbo became handsome asymmetric off-the-shoulder numbers; colorful getups that wouldn’t look amiss on the “Hunger Games’” Effie Trinket took on a cool punk vibe.
A key to the season was that the Dutch design duo’s desire to experiment afresh with the idea of showing the same garment twice, a direction they first explored with atomic mushroom silhouettes in 1998 and several times since, but there was no unlocking a hard-and-fast interpretation.
Post-show interviews turned into a Rorschach-test moment. Was there a Gothic mood? Who had annoyed the avians that the “Angry Birds” collection title referred to? Was there a link to the popular video game, a commentary on the state of the world?
Whatever the answer turned out to be, the duo made a case for letting it all hang out, beautifully so.
