LET THE GAMES BEGIN- THOMAS VICARY'S DEBUT
Stoking a fire of warm rusty reds, Thomas Vicary raised the bar for off-schedule designers like a Chinese pole-vaulter this season with his AW09 collection at the Home House hotel in London on Friday. For an abstracted sensory overview of the collection, I visually recommend diving right into a flashback of the intro- scene to irreversable, and you would get the same sense of impending sexual intensity and similar tonal color palette. Entrusted to help with the fun & faffing backstage, I made an over-flowing a pile of numbered scraps in attempt to aide with the organization but was distracted by the discovery that unzipping some of these dresses is an deliciously artful experience in itself. They wind around and around, silently dissecting the the many seams which slash the figure in a subtle surface of hand-dyed silk.
BTW, I haven't turned and started abusing my position as dresser at this point...! I'm just emphasizing that climbing into these creations would be very very far from a 'pull that over my arse and strike a vogue pose against the cold white tiles in this public bathroom' sort of experience.
With his debut collection since graduating from the MA at CSM, Thomas quite seriously enjoys making a play on contradictory ideals of beauty. Having been Inspired by the contrast of irregular construction and classically glamorous silhouettes, he combined frayed edges and clean lines to the wondrous effect of a fierce fragility.
My favorite piece was the red wool and black chiffon finale-piece which was combined with a giant wooden ring worn around the neck. Later on I tried to don the wooden necklace, but the free drinks compelled me to make disturbing jazz hands at the guests which photographic evidence later suggested made me look like a crazed circus act. Definitely though, the kind of thing I would love to wear in a more sober state in some mood lighting.
Just days after this provision of a red rainbow in womenswear form, I'm pleasured by plenty of red sparkles from Theo Adams at his performance of 'Tonight Is Forever' at the Centre Of The Universe event at the Union Gallery in Southwark . Strangely I find connection in the layered projection of Garland performances and live cabaret presented in the multi-medium performance piece. Emotionally disparate female dancers writhe around Theo as to embody a dangerous hunger for the public exposure of inherit desire to present oneself as a vulnerable product. The dancers eventually torment the space with a sort of shamanistic ritual towards the purposeful anticlimax . The audience is left with an soft wind blowing red tinsel curtains and walls of stained lipstick. I cant help but feel that London is going to be quite literally seeing red this Winter once the local produce has finished presenting its wares.
I expect the soils of old Hollywood will be dug up for further inspirational presentations this London Fashion Week, Is it that there is a kind of nostalgia for refined iconic behavior? Not refined in that the promotion of realism that surrounds celebrity nowadays is edited out, but that it is presented as romantic in all its disturbia....
