Mugler: Menswear and Resort 2013.

This lookbook was strikingly photographed by the head designer himself, Nicola Formichetti, and the clothes were consistently beautiful in a way that still managed to fit in with Resort season's less extravagant mood. Just like how a good album ought to be played at maximum volume, these photos should be as big as possible so you can feast your eyeballs on all that agonisingly clean-cut precision.

There's just something so clean and perfect about this collection -- I love it. The Mugler look has always involved a lot of artificial fabrics and inorganic silhouettes but since Nicola Formichetti took over, the label has taken on a far less aggressive aesthetic and begun to concentrate more on tailoring.

Of course, Mugler tailoring isn't the kind of traditional work we see from the designers who are known for their suits and eveningwear. Formichetti focuses on structure, with this Resort collection looking more like airplane wings and aerodynamic speedboats than normal clothing, even though the pieces themselves (simple skirts and dresses) are technically far more conventional than the iconic spiked corsets of Mugler's heyday in the '90s.

The title of the collection was "Kabuki Kiss", which, OK, is not a good title. It's not like fashion shows ever have particularly inspired and/or comprehensible titles, but this time round it's almost as if they just picked "Kabuki" out at random from a bunch of well-known Japanese words. While the designs did show some Japanese influences, they certainly weren't Kabuki influences -- particularly since the most recogniseable visual of Kabuki is the makeup, and the model's face was hidden in almost every picture. Also, this is one of the least theatrical Mugler shows I've ever seen, what with the smooth silhouettes, the minimalist backdrops and the distinct lack of fetishwear influences.

I don't understand why all Formichetti/Mugler designs don't get bought up and/or plagiarised by sci-fi movie costume designers. (Sidenote: if the costumes in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel aren't any good, then we can totally start a Kickstarter to sue him, right? That's a thing people can do?)

Mugler's Spring 2013 menswear line was a lot less dramatic than the Resort collection, although it did share its largely monochrome colour-scheme and pristine tailoring. The theme, supposedly, was the ocean, although even once I knew this I was hard pressed to see many underwater influences in a show that was mostly made up of razor-sharp, futuristic suits and lapel-free jackets.

There are unnumbered rules on how and when women can show their cleavage/arms/legs to the world, most of them counterintuitive, but for men the rules are relatively simple: do what you like, as long as it doesn't look "like a girl". So, many of the menswear designs that are brought low by the Zoolander Effect do so because they're exposing too much and/or the wrong area of manflesh. However, Mugler takes what I can only describe as the classy approach. For the last couple of seasons a lot of womenswear labels have been experimenting with designs that incorporate slits and windows into unexpected areas like mid-torso and around the ribs (which doesn't translate well to mainstream fashion because normal people have, you know, fat on their mid-torso and rib areas...) with varying results, and this is the menswear equivalent. Formichetti sidesteps any Zoolander issues by making the more revealing outfits as strict as possible in other areas: square shoulders, relatively conservative suit-tailoring, and all-black or all-white colour schemes.

This black outfit looks like it's made from diving suit material so I guess it could be construed as being ocean-themed?? Although to be honest all it really reminds me of is Spock's black Starfleet uniform in the Star Trek reboot movie, which only serves to tear a hole in my soul because then I remember that I have to wait an entire year until Star Trek 2.

Previously: Gareth Pugh and Thierry Mugler: Who needs trends when you're an intergalactic bug-queen?

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Spring 2013 Menswear: Versace loves you.

I love Donatella Versace. Have you ever seen the Saturday Night Live sketches where she's followed everywhere by a crowds of semi-naked male models? I'm pretty sure that's some documentary-style accuracy right there. The theme of this show was pugilism, with most of the models decked out in a selection of tacky gold outfits that fell somewhere between sexxxy gladiator costumes and a Vegas backing-dancer version of boxing robes and prizefighter belts.

pics from Style.com

Before we go any further, I just gotta break it to you: If you don't appreciate the wonders of this show then we can't be friends. It's everything that's wonderful about the horrible sections of Milan menswear design! I mean, at one end of the Milan menswear scale you get the expertly-cut three-piece suits of the type one mostly sees being worn by 60-year-old men on The Sartorialist, but at the other end we have Versace, whose eternal motto seems to be "LESS SHIRT; MORE GOLD".

For the record, this collection is mostly swimwear. I don't know if that's an acceptable explanation for the sparkly harem pants or prizefighter belts, but it does at least legitimise Donatella's decision to expose maximum quantities of bronzed manflesh in the name of high-end fashion. I don't know what the market is for most of these pieces, but there's something glorious about the Versace ethos of supergluing fake gold onto everything and then laughing all the way to the bank. Some day a male Jennifer Lopez will appear and Versace Menswear will become mainstream. Some day, my brethren.

This is what would happen if Magic Mike had a baby with Gladiator and then dressed it up in leftovers from Joan Collins' accessory collection.

Wallet harness? OK. Honestly I love shit like this because I have a weakness for the less clockworky aspects of steampunk designs, plus strapping stuff to your body is way better than having to carry a bag around all the time. I don't know if wallet holsters are likely to catch on anytime soon, but to my eyes this looks totally reasonable, if a little shiny for most busineswear outfits.

I find it interesting that this menswear collection is so varied and interesting (and, yes, ridiculous, but that goes without saying) while Versace's recent relaunch of their womenswear couture line was so lacklustre. This is the kind of fun, eyecatching work Versace should be putting forward for their womenswear lines, not pale imitations of Lady Gaga stage outfits made from cheap-looking plastic fibres.

The shoes were the most obvious mixture of influences in the collection: a boxing boot crossed with gladiator sandals. I kinda love it, but not in a way that I think is... wearable. If you wear them with socks you look like a dweeb, but if you wear them without socks then... I don't even know, because men don't typically expose their toes to the world unless it's a billion degrees outside or they're at the beach, and hot-pink, calf-length boxing boots aren't really suitable for either of those situations.

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Resort 2013: Alexander McQueen, Mother of Pearl, Bibhu Mohapatra, and Roberto Cavalli.

Alexander McQueen
McQueen wins at everything again because as aways, they straight-up discarded your plebeian notions of "Resort clothing" and produced another Couture collection. Or, you know, what would be considered Couture by another designer. Because McQueen Couture usually involves a lot more antlers, brocade, and feathered crinolines.

pics from Style.com

Whatever this fabric is, it looks so much like galvanised steel that it's hard to imagine the model being able to move at all. Although the corset-belted waists were very McQueen, the chilly roboticism of the slim David Bowie suits were surprisingly distant from McQueen is usually known for.

If you don't like clothes with photorealistic insect motifs on them, then I don't like you.

These next two suits are what Tilda Swinton wears in the imaginary movie I'm writing about a Las Vegas talent-manager in the late 1970s who moonlights as a Kill Bill style bounty hunter. (All the "talent" she manages will be played by members of the cast of Teen Wolf.)

My favourite scene in this imaginary movie is probably the one where one of Tilda Swinton's business rivals drips some barbecue sauce on one of her shirt-cuffs, at which point she flips him out of his chair and hangs him out of the window until he apologises.

How, McQueen? How does it work? You take one of my least-favourite items of clothing ever -- the strapless onesie/jumpsuit -- and make it look classy. HOW?

I SWEAR THIS DRESS IS ONE OF THE COSTUMES FROM THE ASGARD SCENES IN THOR.

Mother of Pearl
My opinions of this collection are very mixed. On the one hand we get cool, comfy-looking street style outfits like this...

... but on the other, Mother of Pearl seemed inordinately fond of putting peplums and frills on places where they really should not be. If you're thinking of making a skirt that frills out anywhere lower than the waist? Don't. It looks awful. Especially if it's in a block colour and the rest of the outfit is really plain.

Bibhu Mohapatra
Sad truths: I'm obsessed with this kind of vaguely 1960s-inspired sc-fi minidress, but you so totally know that you wouldn't be able to sit down properly if you were wearing one. Or, like, do anything that isn't related to standing artfully next to something made of chrome in your spaceship-themed nightclub.

Roberto Cavalli
I am never not in favour of clothing that's printed with delicate blue willow porcelein patterns.

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Costume design and the crew of the Prometheus.

Costume design is the point where my positive and negative feelings about Prometheus intersect. The visuals of this movie were amazing, but at the same time I'm of the opinion that almost every reference that directly connected Prometheus to Alien was handled very poorly. I've already written about how the decision to make Prometheus into a glossy sci-fi epic and attempt to overtly tie it to Alien was a mistake, and costume design was definitely one of the details that should have been used to distance Prometheus from Alien, not bring the two together.

In space, all food is brightly-coloured and comes served in Muji containers.

This interview with costume designer Janty Yates touches upon the fact that while the spacesuits in Prometheus were designed to look very different from those in Alien, the indoor/casual clothes were intentionally similar to the costumes worn by the crew of the Nostromo. Which, to me, immediately seems like a bad idea. The waking-up/breakfast scene in Prometheus is already similar enough to the one in Alien that it's a comfortably direct reference, but aside from the basic scene-setting they should have avoided any other similarities because the premise and setting of the two movies are so fundamentally different. Although the two films share the same discovery-thriller structure and pacing, the crews are different people with very different aims in mind. The Nostromo was a beat-up old mining ship, crewed by experienced blue-collar workers who treated each other with friendly, professional wariness; the Prometheus is a brand new, hugely expensive exploration vessel, crewed by academics, businesspeople, and some expert pilots and security staff. The idea of these two casts of characters looking similar makes no sense at all.

Shaw, Ford, Holloway, and Fifield. (pics from www.prometheus-movie.com)

Alien has some of my favourite character-based costume design ever. If you want a bit more detail my review is here, but the short version is that most of the clothes we seen on the crew of the Nostromo are well-worn uniforms, with a couple of personal items thrown in. For a group of people who work for a strongly branded corporation -- and may only be allowed a limited quantity of personal items onboard -- this makes perfect sense, especially when you see how dirty some parts of the Nostromo are. Basically, they are dressing for work on the space equivalent of a long-distance freighter ship. The Prometheus, however, is a completely different kettle of fish. Firstly, the ship itself was built specifically for this mission, and is state-of-the-art. For several of the people onboard this is probably the first time they've travelled to another planet, and in the case of Shaw and Holloway at least, they are passionate. Unlike the characters in Alien or Aliens, they aren't just showing up for another day at work in an uninspiring job they don't particularly enjoy. The fact that everyone seems to be wearing Weyland Industries uniforms kind of makes sense because that's who funded the mission in the first place, but also they're really not very... uniform? This isn't something I have a major problem with, but I do feel like it's been consciously included in order to emulate the aesthetic of Alien in a way that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Ford, Fifield, and Millburn

Much of my confusion about the costuming decisions stems from my confusion about the characters themselves. One of the biggest failings of this movie was its inability to explain why the characters acted the way they did. Which, you know, is kind of an important aspect of storytelling. Alien was simple: the crew of a mining vessel happen upon what appear to be the ruins of an alien structure and accidentally bring an alien onboard their own ship, causing chaos and disaster. Prometheus, though, is a far trickier story to tell, mostly because Ridley Scott made it difficult for himself. The background of the mission to LV-223 was baffling from the start because even once we'd found out Weyland's "true" reasons for wanting to find the Engineers, we still had no explanation as to why half of the people onboard had agreed to come along in the first place. In the introductory scene where Shaw and Holloway explain their hokey search for Bald Xenu Jesus to the rest of the crew, we learn that several of the crewmembers literally do not know why they are there.

Ravel, David, and some redshirts.

As an expository device, that scene was incredibly clumsy. In a more general sense it was even worse because it immediately made me start wondering about a) who the hell signs up for a two-year research mission on another planet without knowing what they'll be working on or why, and b) who picked out the crew in the first place. Because the two people in charge are Vickers and Weyland, and since they're both meant to be entitled, self-absorbed control-freaks, crossing the galaxy in a spaceship full of volatile and/or incompetent strangers seems like a really out-of-character life choice. This Prometheus Pre-Prequel youtube sketch is spot-on with regards to the terrible survival skills of these people. A certain amount of panicked stupidity can be excused in sci-fi and horror movies, but not this much -- especially when you're trying to inject a little gravitas into your sci-fi epic. I mean, either you can tell a story about people struggling with faith and searching for the origins of the human race, or you can make a cheesy horror movie where people get their heads blown up for doing stupid things like taking their helmets off on an alien planet and touching creepy-ass slime worms. You can't have both.

You're an idiot.

There are a lot of clumsy plotholes in Prometheus that I can ignore or explain away, but I just can't find a way to legitimise why Vickers and/or Weyland would actively allow everyone to go into such a dangerous situation completely unprepared. Considering the fact that they're all alone in a spaceship millions of miles away from anything safe or familiar, this shows a distinct lack of the self-preservation instincts that supposedly make up the backbone of Vickers' and Weyland's personalities.

Fifield the geologist is the only crewmember chose characterisation really benefited from his costuming and character design. Although other characters all had little personalised costume details like Holloway's neckerchief (realistically douchey because he's a world-travelling archaelogist), Fifield had the most distinctive style, and for good reason. Aside from Shaw, none of the characters get any explicit backstory. This isn't a criticism per se -- Alien did just fine without providing any backstory for anyone -- but Fifield's actions and appearance made him seem like he might be the kind of person who would be reckless enough to sign up for a lengthy space mission to an unknown destination. It's implied that Fifield has had more field experience than the other academics, specifically in terraforming (Weyland Industries' main focus). His smock is covered in patches, indicating that he's travelled with several other ships, and his personal style is way more individualistic than anyone else's. With his mohawk and tattoos, there's clearly no way that he's going to fit in with the uniform guidelines -- if, indeed, there even are any. The fact that no one seems bothered that he's ditched the uniform entirely just makes everyone else look stranger to me, because if no one's enforcing the uniform rules then why does everyone else appear to be following them?

If the costumes in Prometheus hadn't been so closely related to Alien, I probably would've been way less critical. The visuals are one of the main strengths of this movie, and it's not like I think Janty Yates did a bad job. I think the crew look great, in fact, particularly the spacesuits (which were apparently an absolute bitch to construct and maintain) and Millburn's white tube hoodie, for which I have an inordinate fondness. Ridley Scott is the real source of my irritation here because although he didn't actually write the movie, he's the person who made all the major decisions. He hasn't reached anywhere near George Lucas levels of franchise-ruination, but some of the quotes I've heard from him regarding this movie's mythological background have been rather ominous. As in, his original vision included wayyy more Space Jesus. After 30 years it's  understandable that he'd want to tell a different kind of story than he did when he was just starting out as a director, but rather than providing a complementary addition to the Alien franchise, Prometheus only seemed to ovecomplicate things. Instead of trying to tie the crew of the Prometheus to the crew of the Nostromo he should have done the exact opposite and made them look as different as possible.

Coming soon: David8! Until then, you should totally read that Clothes On Film interview with Janty Yates, particularly if you're interested in the intricacies of how they worked out spacesuit logistics during filming.

Previously
Prometheus: Proof that epic sci-fi doesn't belong in the Alien franchise.
Prometheus and the fannish mindset: Plotholes Aren't Everything.
The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation.
The costumes of Alien. Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

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Resort 2013: Versace, Louis Vuitton, and the undead return of Juicy Couture.

Francesco Scognamiglio

Today's topic is: funsies! Which is the kind of vocabulary that regularly comes to mind when I'm writing about Resort Season. Most of the collections in this post were dominated by silliness and bright colours, ie the main themes of Resort collections the world over -- at least, when they're not dominated by bland, saleably on-trend basics.

Marni
There's a lot of '70s-inspired designs floating around at the moment, much of them kinda fugly because, let's face it: The '70s. For example, there's certainly something to be said for the growing popularity of outfits that combine layers of skirts and/or mid-length trousers with an overskirt, but not when the fabric is rigid and coloured to match the furniture in Starsky & Hutch. Fashion borrows from itself continuously in a series of 25-year loops, as each old trend gradually transforms from "so old" to "charmingly vintage". The thing about "charmingly vintage", however, is that we get to retroactively edit out the non-hideous trends so only the good stuff survives. The whole point of recycling retro styles is that you get to weed out the stuff that looks like this:

Louis Vuitton
More '70s mid-length trousers, but this time they seem to be going for a Barbie Goes Backpacking kind of look.

Honestly though, this whole collection was a major disappointment for me, mainly because last season's Louis Vuitton looked like this:

Norma Kamali
This collection was inspired by the Olympics, which means that Norma Kamali is my auto-enemy. (Barely an exaggeration.) Seriously, the only good thing the Olympics have inspired so far is this Horrible Histories song. Bias aside, this collection wasn't too bad, successfully avoiding most of the traps of sports-inspired fashion. One thing I would criticise is that although I quite like the dress pictured below, it's a bad idea to use shiny fabrics in clothes that you're explicitly marketing as "affordable". I suspect that most of these clothes look kinda cheap in real life.

NO. This looks like an air stewardess costume from a 1960s-themed advert for those flights rich people hire to go into the upper atmosphere and experience zero-gravity. If your outfit unironically resembles tinfoil Space Fashion from a vintage TV series, Do Not Pass Go.

Skaist-Taylor
I was totes baffled by the hideousness of this photoshoot until I found out that Skaist-Taylor are the people behind Juicy Couture, at which point everything became clear. I mean, why not pair your party-girl frock with a fake fur stole that looks like it was made from furniture coverings, and then pose in front of a vomit/spilled-makeup combo background? Literally no one who buys these clothes is ever going to see the lookbook anyway.

You just know that anyone who buys this suit is going to wear it with that exact same styling. Women's suits are often modeled with no shirt or bra on underneath (because who wants to look at pictures of women where all their flesh is covered??) but then worn "normally" in real life, but I suspect that the Juicy Couture crowd will take this lookbook's advice to heart and pair their pink tuxedoes with silver platform shoes and a pout.

Ter et Bantine
I feel like I have whiplash from switching straight from Skaist-Taylor to the calm and stylish lines of Ter et Bantine. Snobbery-whiplash, that is. Chances are, these two types of outfit will be marketed at exactly the same economic bracket, except the women wearing Skaist-Taylor will be rich because they're reality TV stars while the women wearing Ter et Bantine will be interning at their father's publishing company. Women wearing Skaist-Taylor put their party photos on Facebook; women wearing Ter et Bantine have text-free Tumblr accounts where they reblog The Sartorialist and whimsical photos of coffee paraphernalia.

Thom Browne
Thom Browne is dedicated to designing clothes that look objectively ridiculous, particularly menswear. The deicsion to attempt a marketable Resort collection, therefore, was kind of baffling. While some outfits were entertainingly silly (see below for borderline Willy Wonka cosplay), most were disappointingly bland and adhered to the kind of preppy tameness that I'd expect from... well, anyone but Thom Browne. I mean, for a guy whose last menswear collection combined gimp masks, belly shirts and pastel-checked trouser suits, this show was distinctly unimpressive.

Versace
The faux-masculine slouching, bright colour scheme, Joan Jett hair and spike heels all added up to something that looked like a cross between a K-pop photoshoot and a makeup ad. This isn't something I'd expect from a label this famous but I can't deny that it's fun, even though the collection does seem to skew a lot younger than I'd expect from Versace.

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