Olivier’s first collection in Paris was intended as a visual calling card; nothing shown was for sale. Made at home, the pieces were constructed from what the self-taught designer had at hand: vintage fabrics, some with an “out of the tomb” vibe, antique laces, family linens, as well as toiles de jouys and other interiors fabrics from Pierre Frey that “were just perfect,” Theyskens says today, “to mix with the authentic old ones.” Striking a different note were tough and sexy black leathers, a material that the Belgian had long wanted to work with and continued to thereafter. Besides the technical appeal of a material that has no give, leather provided aesthetic “definition” to Theyskens’s work.
Among the most dramatic looks were those with embroidered hearts and veins, seen by the designer as romantic and expressive of complex yet fragile emotions. Unmissable was a furry monster-woman all in black with red “blood.” Though her face was entirely covered the models sported ghost-pale powdered makeup, courtesy of Peter Phillips, a look which Theyskens describes as “not undone, but just unfinished.” A few models maneuvered down the runway in the clutches of mannequin-hand headpieces which originated in the designer’s initial drawings and which gave the impression that the models were somehow being manipulated. “With my Belgian roots, I think I have a little bit of a surrealistic touch sometimes, and it’s this little added accessory that gave the feel of awkward, slightly disturbing element,” explains Theyskens.
Though the collection was dubbed “gothic” by Vogue, the designer says that at the time he loved to look at Florentine studies of anatomy, as well as the 17th and 18th centuries and also the end of the 19th century, with its beads and lace. “I was just putting together all these passions. I was also discovering how to do voluminous garments, it was the first collection where I put trains on the dresses. When I look back, some of the charm of this collection is that I can tell how much I’m trying different types of things as a discoverer or explorer, I was really doing things mostly for the first time.”
