pictures: Valentino Haute Couture A/W 2011
runway via
details via
I love the fact that the concept of Russian royalty fleeing Soviet Russia was the inspiration behind this collection. It's a historical detail and mindset I've always found so fascinating to think about, probably because I romanticise the strangeness and foreignness and and loss and longing for the past that comes with it. And this showed so beautifully in the details invoking the early 1900s - the buttons, the occasionally wide sleeves getting narrow at the wrists.
But then just as the idea of aristocracy is tangled in tradition, the collection seemed a bit like Virginia Woolf's Orlando - indebted to the past and to history as a whole, as a concept. There were echoes of everything - Scarlett O'Hara and her velvet courtain-dress, the great Russian novel and it's mid-19th century balls, flappers, 30s elegance, the 60s backs boldly showing, even the simplicity of the 90s. Also pointed out by Miss Moss, the medieval legacy was everywhere - capes and velvet, braided hair and the woven belts and trimmings, long gowns and long sleeves, collars coming all the way to the neck. Sometimes all the gold and silver and closed up fronts even became evocative of armour, and that in turn made me think of the bullets bouncing off the Romanov princesses' bodies because they had diamonds sewn into their corsets.
Of course, all these eras of fashion and history were challenged and subverted, diffusing but miraculously coming together in a sense of wondrous confusion and over-arching nostalgia. And I think what I find most important is how all this beauty corresponds with all of our own longing for the times we hadn't lived through; the confusion and nostalgia of our own time.
