“One of the great things about London, of course, is that it was bombed.” Hussein Chalayan is adept at making both statements and garments that sound and look challenging to process, yet which, upon further reflection or wearing, impose their own Chalayan-ish logic. It takes a while, but you get there. Bombed London-wise, the designer was discussing the fracturing effect of German explosives on the postwar socioeconomic shape of the city. The bombing itself was terrible. However, one of its by-products was less so; the Blitz tore apart the fabric of the English capital to create room for the poor and recently arrived to live cheek by jowl with the rich and established.
Chalayan was musing about London but thinking about Paris, a capital with a much more rigid socio-geographic structure. As previously explained in the review of the menswear collection that was produced in tandem with this Pre-Fall: “This season’s show was titled Périphérique after the 25 km highway that encircles Paris and is effectively a moat between the affluent, established inner confines of the city and the banlieues, or suburbs, beyond—in which a large proportion of Paris’s immigrant population is centered. That inspiration—the tensions that ensue from unintegrated immigration—manifested itself abstractedly.”
As with the menswear, Chalayan created apparently eroded or slashed-away layers in his garments here—silk viscose and wool dresses sometimes patterned with Venn diagrams and leopard print, or North African blanket print, or a double-layered corduroy overcoat. This he described as “an exercise in merging and separation.” The raw edges on these layered strata suggested tension. Semi-detachable loops of cloth, buttonable in various ways to semi-enfold the body or hang loose, were integrated as an abstracted metaphor for a journey that goes nowhere; there were less here than in men’s. As with every Chalayan collection, the abstracted inspiration did not define it—you didn’t have to have badly handled immigration on your mind to get a kick out of the clothes—but they added an extra layer the cognoscenti will appreciate.
