Chalayan Spring 2018 Ready-To-Wear....Faashionweekly...On Fow24news.com

Immediately before this show, deep in the bowels of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, in a corridor packed tightly with models and production staff and dressers and hairstylists and photographers and makeup professionals, Hussein Chalayan talked theme....
The show was inspired, he said, “by the idea of the lost individuals in a digital world. And living with the opinion of others, but at the same time being empowered by the entitled state. So I found that there were these two things going on. On the one hand, the weakened position that relies on the opinion of others; but at the same time, those individuals who are quite entitled. So there are these frames around the body to redefine a confidence in the body, but also it falls, it drapes.”

So was the draping meant to reflect those who have their opinions defined by others, and the frames meant to represent the assertively entitled?

Chalayan almost rolled his eyes. “It’s an aura, Luke! It’s not literal!”

What was literal was an opening section of gray suiting and dresses, sometimes worn with black veils and sunglasses, that featured trademark Chalayan tricksiness via carefully crafted swell and protuberance in silhouette. A white cotton shirt worn with high-waisted pants featured an extra fold of material running from neck to wrist, like the wing of a sugar bat. A fantastically cut, black double-breasted suit featured a half tail that hung from the right side of the jacket at the back below a large cut-out panel. A print of what looked like eucalyptus leaves was drawn in white dots on a black dress, the engineering of which was hard to fathom, but looked wonderful.

Then, the weird stuff kicked in. Two monochrome looks featured pants with wide stiff panels that protruded from the leg. A really gorgeous floral and then two plain dresses featured little fluoro strips—micro Post-it notes—that echoed the pants’ protrusions. And then, the five final looks emerged, outfits whose pin-defined decoration continued out of the dress and onto the frames the models wore on their faces. The relationship between this designer’s conceptual source code and the clothes that ensue is often obtuse—it’s not literal!—and that’s just how Hussein rolls. Something he said of this collection—“a dance between slowness and speed”—might just as much apply to his own compelling creative rhythm.