Don’t touch! No communication of any kind! » That’s the Bruce Nauman sound bite we hear in Viktor and Rolf’s winter fashion show. « No emotion! » echoes Jun Takashi, who mumified the bodies and faces of his Undercover models.
The mood of fashion has drastically changed this winter, unequivocally heralding a new decade. It’s all about chaste sobriety, shouded decadence, secret perversity, masked self-defense, isolation and exile. An almost violent austerity. Fashion clearly has an apocalyptic vision of our brutal world, and has responded with one word: Protection. This solemn elegance, paradoxically, reinforces the power of women, amounting to a political reaction to sexy glamour, and over-exposed vulgarity, a power that Stefano Pilati celebrates in his brillant new YSL collection.
We see a novel gender crossing, blurring the boundries of sexual identity, and of man/woman duality. Until now, the qualities of strength and fragility, romance and violence, visibility and…