Myf Shepherd for Peter Jensen Spring/Summer 2009 - London Fashion Week

Visual advertisements and those skyscrapering billboards, rather unexcitingly devour our social landscape with literal and subliminal messages flooding our minds. But in the case of The Netherlands for example, these semiotic messages are beautified and compacted - cased by the functional street furniture by JC Decaux. And rather then the hell hold of bland and consuming campaigns, usually the local streets are attracted with musical or theatrical posters incisioned with a high considerability of Dutch Graphic Design. In which case, this aspect of ‘visual pollution’ can act also as an unusual approach but in a fitting way to generate key ideas for a brand new collection. So rather than an interpretation of a new season with influences by an artist, an abstract concept or the parameters of the visual arts, Stephan Schneider pinpoints and focuses on the visual billboards seen around his city of residence. It is a sore of brilliant eyesight and why brilliant? Deconstructing and abstracting those pictorial and representational elements within repetitive advertisements that would call utter foul by American graphic designer Paul Rand has given life to garment pieces that are incredibly soft and gentle.

Stephan’s palette incorporating rich muted and toned shimmering white, purple, olive grey as well as dark navy are materialised as both highly tactile and strongly woven. Given that Stephan develops his own fabrics as the choices for his menswear and womenswear collection, the latter prominently accentuates collar buttoned shirting with short arm lengths, extended lightweight trench coats - nonchalant oversized shirts and jersey dresses that has woven printed grid lines are watermarked. Other designed pieces such as the dresses have curved shorten hemlines in one example, the dark draped tied skirt and shoulder jerseys sharply tailored. It is as though Stephan has yielded his soft hands in this collection and as with all his previous ones. And menswear is distinctively fabricated with minimalist top-buttoned shirting, shirt zipper jackets and checkered shirting that again, permeates the collection’s mood of being loosely ostracized. It connects to the collection title, ‘Blank Billboards’ and just as the process of placing a billboard advertisement up onto its metal frame, the gluing dries out - the advertisements and its colours, its focal message fades away. Consider it as visual propaganda but disciplined to be used within fashion.

Please view the complete collection on the Stephan Schneider website.

And just as this collection story has unfolded and finished, Stephan and his team in snowing Antwerp are already working away at his upcoming Autumn/Winter 2009 collection. Paris Fashion Week for 2009 is only a corner away…

Stephan Schneider’s clothes are available at Très Bien Shop in Malmö and online here.

Stephan Schneider

As true for most Belgian designers, they allow their clothes and the wearer to bear answering questions for themselves, what the clothes mean to them. Veronique is beloved by so many people and yet her appearances are so far few in between. Luckily enough, FashionTV were able to gain backstage coverage of her latest runway show for Spring/Summer 2009 during Paris Fashion Week and you can see herself in the video wearing her black tailored jacket. Please treasure your copy of A Magazine by Veronique herself or if you haven’t, find it and buy it!

Since 2005, Veronique has been working as the artistic course director of the Fashion Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

You can never be too accustomed and know what Sally and Micah are up to in developing each new collection season. Each season, there is no underlying theme only associations, cues, uniforms and social periods that define what Rittenhouse means. This mould has been carefully crafted when a surprise opportunity to meet and talk about their new Spring/Summer 2009 collection arose. It was as an insightful and exciting experience. The Rittenhouse studio is not grandeur,  far from it and not in anyway as being touted to a super-sized one like that of Martin Margiela’s. But it isn’t about the studio, it’s about the clothes and everyone knows, in the darkest most unprofessional spaces, the best ideas come alive. 

Clearly for this new collection, Micah wanted to challenge and breath new life into Rittenhouse’s signature handprinted t-shirts. The inspiration was from fireworks or bright sparks elevating a sense of energy displacement in three developed t-shirts of Ink Radial, Sergeant and Halo.  It gave a sense that everything was crisper, more acute and sharp. Womenswear is sensually tactile. The convergence of dark heavy texture in the use of wool, denim and chambray in the dark extended anorak in its inner lining was contrasted from the soft, sheer woven pieces of silk cotton. The key pieces in the womenswear collection included a denim curved hem skirt, striped fancy shirt with authentic New Zealand sea-shell buttoning, a drawstring dress with pleated collar, a rounded collar navy ‘Peter Pan’ sweater and black jersey pants of a higher waist and low crotch nonchalantly giving confidence. Strongly focused is menswear with elegant tailoring in the form of sand yarn dyed plackett shirting adding muscle shell buttoned detailing on the front.

Constantly altering the way they perceive how a seam should be sewn or be concealed, cleverly positioned or even patched by eyelits, everything was complimentary toned and focused for being naturally dressed. Their love for obtusely changing a typical garment and adding military and children’s wear references is Rittenhouse’s unpredicable progession and success.

What label doesn’t have their own store? Rittenhouse don’t and Sally once said she would love to have Rittenhouse’s own in Paris. The label has had enormous international success and this idea probably won’t still be imagined for long.

The Spring/Summer 2009 collection for this season are mirrored story themes of childrenswear, mililtary and traditional fabrics. The collection will be available early next year respectively at Our Spot, Oi Polloi in Manchester, In God We Trust in Brooklyn, I Heart in New York and also at Totokaelo in the near future.

Rittenhouse

You have to admire the enormous task by fashion designers working on edge with some producing both menswear and womenswear meaning a total of four collections each season and it’s still as difficult if it isn’t shown on schedule. Some work with a particular theme as their evoked starting point, others use their social and urban landscape and what they discover that drives their capability in developing their collection. And then there are special ones which devour our global community as an universal source of glowing inspiration, cultures and diversity of ideas. There is no doubt that the influential movement of the Belgian Fashion scene has created an infectious phenomenon with the 1980’s crew including Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten driving a radically new way of thinking how to design clothes emphatically with discipline - from colour, fabric to manufacturing and presentation of a collection. Inevitably, this would lead to a whole new generation of young, forward-thinking designers all outweighing each other. Notably, this would include Veronique Branquinho and Stefan Schneider but then around the corner, there’s someone quiet but as potent as any of his fellow designers. His name? Christian Wijnants.

A trait that we have come to expect from these Belgians wunderkinds is their modest and self-effacing personalities and that is another by-product of the Antwerp school - letting the clothes by the creator speak onto its own platform. Christian has kept his feet firmly on the ground and since 2003, he has continued to show his work twice every year during Paris Fashion Week. His reasons for wanting to become a fashion designer is a stark rise to breeding a sense of original creative thinking in the way he designs his womenswear collection by injecting cosmopolitan influences all the way from the Far East. Channelling the hope and optimism people living in poor and famine run counties such as India, his dresses are a pleasing tension of the swift transformation from adolescence to adulthood.

The Spring/Summer 2009 collection is an adornment to human mark making on one’s own body. This ancient tradition of skin decoration is a provision of origin, tribe, background and simply the evolution of personal style. This new collection is influenced by East African tribes of the Surma and Mursi. Translated pieces in a contemporary way, fluid silk dresses structured cleverly with accentuated slight folds, knots and vest buttoning. This combines a beautiful and sheer romantic textural effect produced by Chrisitian’s technique of Trompe l’oeil, echoing the mixed fabric prints reflecting the natural complexity of the African wilderness. Tunic sleeveless dresses in aromatic pink, textual flower bouquets with mixed tie-dye printed technique elevates a bucket pleated skirt in sun yellow. Christian has further developed the collection by adding a set of tailored jackets in single breasted black, cropped vintage and a twisted vest dress in crystal grey.

Sleeveless tunic dress; extended blazer jacket dress with zipper pockets

White silk shoulder dress; canvas jersey printed top with narrow denim

The richness and diversity of his collection is both delightful and integral. In the Spring 2008 issue of Austrian magazine Indie, he converses by saying:

‘I like it when women dress naturally and have that certain casual-ness. I’m not one for going over the top. You can easily lose all the sense of personality that way.’

Matched jersey top and pants with Trompe L’oeil; mini-vest demim dress

Distinctively empowering, with his love also of knitwear, his authenticity as a designer shines through.

Christian Wijnants was born in 1977 and in 1996, moved to Antwerp to study at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Fashion. Following this, he went on to directly assist Dries Van Noten. Establishing his own company in 2003, he gain the success of two awards in succession (Swiss Textiles Award) in 2005 and the ANDAM Award in 2006. Developing his own collections, he is also a teacher at the Royal Academy.

His clothes are only available in Sydney at Belinda.

Christian Wijnants

In the depths of blog archives, a wonderful image has sprouted of Ute Ploier. The Austrian designer is one of few menswear designers today (being also female in most particular) that is challenging the perceptions of what the contemporary young man is wearing. For her, fashion doesn’t directly correlate with menswear so easily. Her nature as a designer stems from a critical understanding of what menswear can be or how it perhaps may be interpreted. She looks into historical references, architecture and literature to produce a menswear collection which is contemporary and new with unconventional detailing and strong tailoring in methods of manufacture as for example, her beautiful white poplin collar button shirting. This year, we have seen a number of coveted menswear designers doing marvelously well and their outcomes in their respective collections such as Raf Simons is has progressive and futurist. But overall, a collection of clothes that interacts a social mainframe of ideas plus a highly prêt-à-porter range speaks immediately from the heart. If Raf Simons has won recognition for this year’s best designed collection, he would deserve and rightly so but as a personal winner, Ute Ploier is already there. And best of all, a vote for her is a vote for Raf as he was her mentor during her studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

If you have not seen Ute Ploier’s current new collection, please view it on Cultures In Between for exclusive press images and story here.

Ute Ploier

Having followed closely of the development of his past two season collections, Jeremy Laing has showcased his design abilities in garment construction and intricate pattern-making that is an outlet for a vision of fabric fluidity and a natural occurrence of functioning clothes. His insight in a minimalist textural form contributes to an outreaching geometric curved structure, a flowing fit on the female body. The new collection range for Spring/Summer 2009 was a build-up of key dresses in silk vicose and chiffon. Lightweight tones in silk vicose and matte shimmered shoulder top were approached with light satin short pants, buttoned top shirts in black and transparent white, transparent crinkled net skirt and a repeated slit patterned poncho in elongated black. Further additions to the range were a long linen coat, shoulder tank linen dress and ballooned waist skirts. These were beautiful extensions to an experiemental focus on the contemporary dress.

Jeremy Laing

The barren and dark landscape is associated by the geographical locality of Eastern Europe. And why is it that most who travel there such as Transylvania in Romania converse by saying it has a romanticised dark beauty? The Parisians have a term ‘Belle Laid’ meaning ‘Beautiful Ugly’ and the run-down, derelict and demoralised and rummaged surroundings concur with the result of a war-torn history. New York based designer Robert Geller has stormed through the financial dark times and although this was not his initial conceptual cue his new collection for Spring/Summer 2009 embodies more of a personal celebration, that of his marriage.

His personal trip to Eastern Europe translated into a grey and monochromatic palette of linens, wool and leather. A breath of finely sharp masculine tailoring of dark washed denim pants, a black single breasted jacket and a linen striped jacket with cropped pants and unbuttoned cardigan provided an elongated yet slim silhouette. His cleverly cut wool cardigans, dark tactile waist coats in grey were slightly rebellious but still enhanced by a perfected and meticulous dinner blazer jacket. The grey and cream white t-shirting gave an inner loose structure with a symmetrical exterior texture, shown through his bold use of vertical. stripes. The gradient shading on the narrow slim pants in plum and charcoal grey were a focal point as to his blue leather jacket and black striped shoulder jacket.

Perhaps some of the smaller detailed motifs such as the flowers and top hats could perhaps be a subtle remark as with Ann Demeulemeester’s direction for her Winter 2008 collection but nevertheless, Robert has certainly grown into a well-developed designer of his own accord. Some of the dark and fine washes is as a reminiscence of his German background which could also refer to the military film, ‘The Great Escape’. Robert has ultilised his visual eye of urban patterning which provided him with the natural sources of spatial spaces, abandonment buildings, shapes, surfaces and layers of history embedded by a war-torn historical locality and which has traced back to his designed collection. This glowering dark perception is as sharply tailored and aesthetically good. We look forward to the release of the collection and to his new line of jewelery and sunglasses range.

The Spring/Summer 2009 collection looks were photographed by Will Davidson and courteously provided by Our Spot.

Robert Geller