Sheguang Hu, and why The Hunger Games' Capitol should've looked more like Beijing Fashion Week.

Beijing Fashion Week rarely makes it to mainstream American/British fashion magazines and blogs, and coverage outside of highlight galleries seems to be nigh-on impossible to find. Which is too bad, because if you enjoy truly out-there couture (which I do) then Beijing is streets ahead of Paris at the moment. Although designers like McQueen are still regularly turning out excellent couture shows, I've found that many of the major fashion houses on the London/Paris/Milan/NYC circuit have been noticeably lacklustre over the last few years.

photos from here.

Autumn/Winter 2012/13
Last month's Sheguang Hu show in Beijing was gothic and alarming, and filled with expressive and over-the-top millinary.

I loved the fabric used for this dress. Hundreds of tiny, mournful faces printed onto the fabric, acting as a counterpoint to the aggressive metal spikes on the belt and shoulder-straps. This entire collection was about combining conservative, relatively simple silhouettes with extravagant detail work. Although a few elements of fetishwear and classic goth/punk looks were included, they were far more subtle and less cliched than those found in most "dark" collections.

One of the reasons why I took such a shine to Sheguang Hu is that he shares my love of upholstery fabrics. In general I think florals are vastly overused in almost every area of fashion design, but when they're a) used in the context of an aggressively structured outfit like the one pictured below, or b) printed or embroidered in the style of pre-1900s fabric designs, then I approve. Another thing I've noticed about Huang's designs is that although he's very fond of the ever-favoured super-slim fitted dress, he does include quite a few more forgiving cuts -- something that's doubly unusual in couture shows, because couture is so obviously not created to appeal to general audiences. But the suit below would work on a variety of women's body shapes.

Spring/Summer 2012
For contrast, I'm including some of my favourites from last season's collection as well. A lot of designers don't vary much from season to season (not necessarily a bad thing -- for example, Gareth Pugh makes clothes exclusively for fetish robots who never go outside or, indeed, breathe, eat or walk anywhere, so "seasons" are completely arbitrary) but Sheguang Hu's Spring and Fall 2012 collections were very different.

Spring/Summer photos from here.

Sheguang Hu moved to Amsterdam as a teenager, studied design there, and now owns a store in the city. I think there are definite European influences in his work, but those influences seem to stem from the fashions of three or four hundred years ago. It reminds me a little of Vivienne Westwood, in fact -- pastiches on the theme of neck-ruffs, Tudor corsets and heavily embroidered fabrics, but never anything that actually resembles period costume.

This candy-pink dress is strictly fairytale, but manages to avoid venturing into Harajuku territory thanks to the huge, robe-like sleeves and simple silhouette.

One of my favourite outfits of the entire collection. It combines the full sleeves of a 16th century gentleman's padded cloth "armour" doublet with a more feminine bodice and modern trousers, creating a shape and aesthetic that overall fails to identify with any era. This look reminded me very much of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, although perhaps that's partially down to the slightly Tilda Swintonish redhaired model.

Looking at many of the highlights from Beijing Fashion Week I not only mourn the comparative tameness of recent Paris/London/etc Couture shows, I find myself getting slightly annoyed at the Hunger Games movie. I haven't posted about it here on Hello, Tailor (yet) but I must admit I found the supposedly-extravagant costumes of the Capitol unexpectedly disappointing. There was a fair amount of pre-movie viral marketing centred around the Capitol fashions, but when it came to the film itself I realised that many of the most prominent costumes had already been revealed, and the bar for outlandishness was nowhere near as high as I'd expected. I'm not saying I disliked the costumes, but I am hoping they edge more towards the Nicki Minaj/Sheguang Hu/Alexander McQueen end of the scale in the sequels as opposed to the brightly coloured but ultimately uninspiring looks we saw this time round.

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Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture, Spring 2012.

The fashion world isn't known for its careful handling of sensitive subjects, so a couture collection inspired by Amy Winehouse, a mere six months after her death, wasn't as surprising as it might have been in a different industry.

They say Winehouse had iconic style, but much of that was down to hair and makeup. Her particular brand of kitschy rockabilly-lite came into its own after she hit the A-list (and therefore probably had a stylist), and wasn't far off the street-style of hundreds of other Camdenites. The beehive wig and cat-eye makeup are memorable enough that they make for a recognisable Amy Winehouse look when combined with almost any outfit.

Gaultier is known for his corsets; for elaborate sexiness. Winehouse was known for trashiness, imbued with the infamy of all talented young addicts who die young in the public eye. This collection managed to take enough inspiration from Winehouse that the influence was visible in at least half of the outfits, but avoided heavy-handedness. It succeeded for the same reason as why most Couture designs inspired by, say, Marilyn Monroe or Grace Kelly, are doomed to critical failure these days. Marilyn and Grace are both remembered for wearing sumptuous gowns and movie-costume formalwear (and in Grace Kelly's case, literally becoming a princess) so any couture line drawing inspiration from them is going to end up looking like unimaginative pastiche. But couture's need for luxury and experimentation meant that a direct copy of Amy Winehouse's pencil skirts, polka-dots and Camden Market attire was out of the question. It had to be tempered with the high-end gloss of classic Gaultier.

There were almost 70 looks in this show, meaning that it was more likely for anyone watching to find at least a few things they liked. I tried to pick out a fair sample of the collection as a whole, as opposed to just a few of my favourites (or most-loathed) as I normally would.

The vinyl leggings make this outfit entertainingly tacky, almost Halloween costume-ish, but I suppose it's conceivable that Winehouse might have worn it onstage. Her main fashion rule seemed to have been "make it tight", after all.

Tellingly, my first assumption was that this next outfit must have been taken from some paparazzi shot of Winehouse in a hotel bathrobe or similar. Is there a famous "Amy Winehouse in a dressing-gown" tabloid story? I have no idea. It seemed like a curious inclusion in the show, which aside from this was split evenly from direct Winehouse outfits (ie, 1950s pedal-pusher leggings, bodices, and pencil skirts) and straight-up Gaultier Couture.

Unsurprisingly, this kimono was one of my favourite looks. Unwearable in the context of everyday life, of course, but this is Couture, dahling.

There were a lot of veils in this collection, and this particular dress appeared both with and without, reappearing at the end as the traditional Couture wedding dress finale. A beautiful example of Gaultier structure-work, although that meant it looked as if it could have come from any number of his previous collections.

Mafia wife chic? Not far off Winehouse, I suppose. The colour scheme on the outfit below is far from appealing to me, but the look as a whole has a certain extravagant tackiness to it that makes me marvel a little. There have been quite a lot of scarf-dresses on the catwalks in recent months, but Gaultier gave this one enough structure that it doesn't look like the all-to-easily-faked scarf dresses of whoever it was who co-opted a truckload of Hermes for their show last season.

Andrej Pejic: a current favourite of Gaultier (among many others) and here paired interestingly with a dress that clearly both adjusts considerably around the torso (lacing everywhere, in an homage to... every Gaultier womenswear collection ever, I should think) and has enough bulk around the hips to disguise the fact that he's not quite the same shape as the other models.

Beautiful.

By the latter half of the runway show, the theme was leaning more to the Couture end of the balance, especially since the veils showed up. Ordinarily I find translucent veils rather pointless since they're so inextricably linked with weddings, not to mention highly impractical and rarely worn. But almost every veil shown here was beautiful, adding another layer of patterns to otherwise simpler outfits. The outfit below would've been a fairly standard Gaultier dominatrix look, were it not for the intricate patterns embroidered (woven?) into the veil. Also it livens up that good ol' virgin/whore juxtaposition that the fashion world has been so fixated with since Madonna -- the New York one, that is, not the one from Galilee.

The gold-detailed veil below was one of my favourites. I'd be psyched to see this sort of thing in more real-life outfits, possibly in a skirt since I find the current trend for black mesh/translucent skirts to be very unattractive. If the mesh or tulle could be used as a backdrop to hold some sort of iridescent or colourful pattern, it'd stop the wearer looking like they'd forgotten to put on their overskirt.

While writing this, I realised that one way in which Amy Winehouse is an excellent choice for Gaultier is lingerie. Like Tracey Emin, Amy Winehouse was a great proponent of the "if you're wearing a good bra, show it off" school of dressing -- a philosophy to which I also ascribe, although perhaps not for every scenario (viz: job interviews; funerals). This dovetails conveniently with Gaultier's devotion to vintage underwear styles and visible corsetry.

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Spring 2012 Haute Couture: Dior, Mabille, Valli, Givenchy, Versace, and Armani.

Christian Dior

It's rare for me to agree with anything the Guardian' Fashion Editor Jess Cartner-Morley writes, but today's "Has couture lost its edge?" article was pretty spot on. So far the shows at Couture Fashion Week have been lacklustre, when ordinarily they'd be the highlight of the fashion world's year. That's the danger of working in an art form that relies upon funding from retail business and work from hundreds of disparate corporate employees worldwide. In times of economic difficulty, imagination and creativity have to fall by the wayside in favour of saleability and broad appeal. The Dior show was a textbook  example of this: sumptuous quality combined with a back-to-basics approach to the classic New Look silhouette -- a collection that could have been released at any time in the last 60 years, and sold well in any of them.

I have less criticism for Dior than I do for many of the other designers who resorted to trotting out entire collections of tired gown clichés this season. The New Look is Dior's heritage and legacy, and the quality of their Couture is so high that I can excuse a season or two of relatively bland designs. Plus, when Dior stages a Couture show they really know how to go for full-on glamour and allow the models to work it for once, instead of making them strut and down like seething, expressionless droids.

All pics from Style.com

Alexis Mabille

Another example of beautifully-made gowns that are ultimately rather dull. This show had something of the designer's sketchbook about it -- colour-coded outfits wherein almost every model was wearing a relatively normal-looking dress such as one might find at any high-end store, plus matching facepaint and an enormous flower head-dress to spruce it up. It all seemed rather expected -- a sense of colourful richness but with very little thought behind it, and no theme outside the blindingly obvious statement of colour-coded formalwear and extravagant hats.

Giambattista Valli
I picked these two outfits since they so efficiently illustrate the many similiarities between the Giambattista Valli and Christian Dior collections. A largely monochromatic palette with a few hints of pastel colour thrown in, narrow-waisted hourglass figures, and a multitude of sheer skirts. Superficial similarities, but close enough that having looked at the Dior show first, Giambattista Valli left me feeling thoroughly bored. While Dior was very obviously Couture -- and quite married to the classic full-skirted New Look silhouette -- many of the Giambattista Valli designs could have come from a ready-to-wear show, since they were little more than classically feminine evening dresses or pencil skirt combos made with transluscent fabric to inject a little daring into the proceedings.

Givenchy
Thanks to the presence of the basketball, this immediately reminded me of Alien: Resurrection. Sigourney Weaver's brown leather costume wasn't a million miles away from some of Givenchy's scaly, bug-like designs this season, and the basketball scene is one of the most iconic scenes in that movie. Givenchy was the first departure from outright prettiness that I'd seen this season, and it was a welcome change.

The sci-fi comparisons aren't unfair. Like Versace, Givenchy's show was partially inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, combining the the grim and practical with the floor-length glamour of 1930s evening gowns. I will express no surprise whatsoever if Rooney Mara ends up wearing something from this collection to the Oscars.

Versace
This was Versace's first Couture show since 2004, and it might have been a wise idea to leave the public showings for another year. The cheap backdrop and garish lighting gave the whole thing something of a gameshow feel, and the designs themselves -- supposedly themed around the movie Metropolis, which was decidedly not known for its bright colour scheme -- mostly looked like B-grade Lady Gaga costumes. And Lady Gaga doesn't do B-grade. 

Outfits like this almost smacked of degree shows and trainee designers -- it's nothing more than an extremely simple evening dress, plus wire contouring on one side to give it that space-age look. A watered-down version of mid-90s Thierry Mugler's brightly-coloured, structural extremism. Several of the designs almost looked (dare I say it) cheap, which is the ultimate no-no for Couture.

Armani Prive
Snakeskin and business-casual: not a combination you hope or expect to see outside of garish '90s TV. But this time I think it worked, partly because there was no serious suggestion that this was real officewear, and partly because the snake theme was so evident throughout the show. Evident, but unlike the aimlessly colour-coded outfits at Alexis Mabille, not without substance.

Every single outfit had some aspect of the snake to it. All were sleek and coloured around green jewel tones and glossy black, but the fabrics ranged from literal (fake snakeskin) to more experimental (snake print, fishnet that from afar gave the impression of mottled scale patterns, overlapping sequins, and interlocking slats of fabric that resembled an extreme close-up of scales).

The only actual snakes present were in tiny details. If any of the models had actually been dressed as snakes instead of merely holding a couple of snakelike characteristics, the show would have tipped over into the realm of obviousness.

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Alexander McQueen, Spring/Summer 2012.

My final S/S 2012 Fashion Week post! I'm now taking suggestions as to what I should write about after this. Ben-Seven suggested the theme of "top five movies, judging by costumes", which sounds damn near impossible because there are just so many choices. Although the #1 movie I saw this week was the Three Musketeers, which went something like this: 25% Orlando Bloom and Milla Jovovich gleefully over-acting at one another, 25% WTF airships, 25% D'Artagnan being unbearable, and 25% OMG THOSE DOUBLET & HOSE ARE AMAZING. Unfortunately, I think most of this film's audience were pre-teens and their parents who took the opportunity to nap for two hours in the cinema, so the internet is yet to provide me with the hi-res screencaps I've come to expect thanks to my recent cinematic diet of superhero movies with intense fanbases. Anyway, if you have any particular fashion-blogging requests, comment/message me! :)

McQueen wasn't as dazzling as last season, but this show definitely stretched the limits of "Ready To Wear". With this level of intricate beadwork, stitching and lace, Alexander McQueen is almost filling the gap left by the financial dissolution of Christian Lacroix last year.

Glam Batgirl.

This season, McQueen combines extreme feminity with monstrousness. Sarah Burton seems to have included fewer animalistic influences in this show than can be seen in some of McQueen's own later collections, but the masks and headdresses still lend an air of the sinister. Alexander McQueen designs have always been brilliant when it comes to evoking aggression without resorting to an appearance of masculinity.

pics from Style.com

With a lot of Sarah Burton/McQueen designs, you get the impression that if you kept zooming in on them then you'd uncover more and more levels of detail. This year the beaded masks were amazing, somehow managing to combine sparkly prettiness with the appearance of barnacles or some kind of organic growth.

(mask close-ups from NYMag.com)

Like Chanel, this show was based around an ocean theme, with frothy jellyfish dresses and hints of coral. I find it difficult to judge McQueen on the same terms as most designers, however, since most of these clothes are more suited to display rather than everyday life. Much Chanel's S/S 2012 collection was perfectly wearable -- providing you're richer than god and never go anywhere near dirt or cold weather -- but McQueen's gowns and masks are more suited to photoshoots, the occasional Lady Gaga video, and the New York Met's Savage Beauty exhibit.

 

Most of the looks were so ostentatious that they were Ready To Wear in name only, but that's very much in-keeping with McQueen's designs in the past. McQueen is one of the few major fashion houses that despite the economic downturn, continues to make art for art's sake rather than toning themselves down in the name of saleability -- and that's certainly worked out for them, because collections like this are headline grabbers and Sarah Burton was the one to make Kate Middleton's wedding dress this year. Why can't more designers go all-out like this?

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