Charles Anastase (Q2730)
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Charles Anastase is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Charles Anastase |
Charles Anastase is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
If you think of London fashion week as a dish, Charles Anastase provides the fugitive spice—an acquired, but every so often appealing taste. His career-long commitment to his louche Lolita muse means she no longer has quite the power to disturb that she once possessed, but Anastase's show today made it clear that his own obsession with this creature rages unabated.As ever, she was supernaturally narrow and tall, perched on skyscraping platforms, with a frizz of Ophelia hair. Her outerwear was a little half-belted princess coat. Her Lolita-ness was incarnate in the silken lining of that coat, which was then transfigured into a tiny, lingerie-influenced dress with a decorous bow at the bodice, or a charmeuse playsuit with a frilled hem. The winking disconnect between the schoolgirlish form of one dress and its grown-up fabric (nude charmeuse) and detailing (covered buttons running down the spine) was quintessential Anastase."I hope it was proper," he piped backstage. Too late, Charles. The lingerie element was scarcely less suggestive than a cardigan dress that buttoned all the way down the back (begging the question: Who actually buttons Lolita into her outfits?). It's clearly not propriety that turns on Anastase—and when a model took to the catwalk in a black velvet jumpsuit with a sheer bodice, it was obvious which side the designer was taking in the face-off between innocence and experience.
18 February 2011
Charles Anastase's world is unsettling. Its population is girls (never women; they never reach that age), girls whose supernaturally elongated proportions are stretched still farther by long dresses and treacherously high platform shoes. Its atmosphere is a mix of the proper and the perverse: Cue the schoolgirl blouse that is buttoned neatly up to the neck and pinned with a pussycat brooch—but that is also entirely see-through. And its culture is Gallic, almost to the point of vaudeville. Anastase comes on like the professional Frenchman abroad, all zese-zose zest forla mode, with Pierrot collars and a Bardot sweater dress slipping off a model's shoulders on the runway, and Serge Gainsbourg's songs all over the soundtrack.The Gainsbourg backing track made one think that the girls, with their heavy-rimmed glasses, mussed bobs, and pretty pouts, might be modeled after the singer's onetime girlfriend Jane Birkin—that is, until Anastase's right hand, Valentine Fillol-Cordier, popped up backstage with heavy-rimmed glasses ("Blind since 5," she said cheerily), mussed bob, and pretty pout. Her sweetness infected Anastase in a positive way: drop waists, flower-studded netting, sheerness that was perversely demure. Perhaps it helped that he built his collection on a dotted Swiss fabric calledplume matis, which brought delicacy tomaîtresse-y pencil skirts at the same time as it underlined the skewed classicism of his vision. (As did the silver brocade pieces, simultaneously ancien régime and rock 'n' roll.) Anastase's world may be unsettling, but itisremarkably consistent—and that's called a signature.
17 September 2010
Finally, Fall fashion acknowledges the Copenhagen conference on climate change. Charles Anastase called his new collection "Winter Garden" to mark the discombobulation of a world where exotic summer fruits and flowers are available in the chill dead of winter. His message was slightly diffused by the fact that he chose a woman he called "a crazy gardener" to embody the concept. That immediately made me picture the eccentric chatelaine of a grand English estate. Was I wrong?There was certainly enough eccentricity to indulge anyone's random reading of the clothes. Proportions were elongated: high-waisted pants flaring to the floor; dresses long, clinging, with a kick pleat; coats huge and blanketlike. This chatelaine probably lived in the forties, but the seventies certainly loved her style, particularly those pants. Though Anastase chose cheerful colors like pink and yellow, he also opted for heavy felted wools. In keeping with the climate-change warning (one model had a skull painted on her face), there wasn't much levity. What little there was came in the form of a plissé smock over Chinese silk pants (now,thatis crazy gardening) or the outfit that featured a drop-waist yellow dress draped with tulle covered in naïf appliqués. I'll give Anastase one thing: He creates images that spin around your head for hours.
19 February 2010
"John's something more abstract." The 1970 quote from Yoko Ono with which Charles Anastase labeled his latest show will surely stand as the season's most impenetrable reference point. That's the way Anastase likes it—he shoots down the tuppenny interpretation. But there was one obvious entry point for his latest presentation: Spring 2010 is Anastase's tenth season, and he wanted the milestone to put a cap on everything he's done to date, thus clearing the decks for the next stage of his career. In other words, he simultaneously celebrated and waved goodbye to his past. "Naïve, spontaneous, abstract, gothic," was how he defined it all. There was naiveté in the girlish pink cheeks and loose chignons of the models, and in their ballerina tulles. There was spontaneity in the seemingly random way cloth was draped, gathered, and layered. An abstract chord was struck by a hint of black tulle poking out from under an innocent smock, and the huge hopsack dress that looked like a Balenciaga gown might if it were sewn by dressmakers in a lunatic asylum. As for the gothic quality, that was in the general Tim Burton-ness of Anastase's clothes; the weird dislocation that came from a matching jacket and skirt (both box-pleated) that made no effort at all to fit the girl wearing them; the silvery moiré jacket over the red ballet skirt; or the voluminous transparent plastic wrap that covered a little pink dress. Outfits jumbled like they were from a dress-up box, combined with a fetishist's eye that just about sums up the narrow aesthetic of Anastase's first ten seasons. But if he untangles his twisted point of view for the next ten, will he lose his odd little niche?
18 September 2009
Someone had fun writing Charles Anastase's show notes. "The gutter of romanticism"? "Defiled refinery"? A wordy way to convey the manner in which the high-waisted, tiered, full-skirted, fairy-tale silhouette Anastase has made his own was, this time, tattered and spattered. One reference point for the collection was "the spirit of Kurt Cobain." The ghost of grunge did seem to hover over the mixing and matching of pieces that could have been harvested from a charity shop: a pink angora coat over a rugby-striped dress, say, or a leopard-print bed jacket over a flaring black skirt, or a tiny plaid jacket worn with over-dyed purple denims. The styling and the shoes—a towering combat-platform boot—fit with the idea. But Anastase was mortified that anyone would read something so literal into his designs."This isn't retro, it's autobiography," he insisted. "It's the clothes we were wearing when I was an adolescent." Yes, they were from a charity shop, but Anastase and friends would customize them, hand-painting them and adding found bits and pieces till they were unrecognizable. The same notion animated a patchworked velvet skirt and all the items in the collection that were painted or scribbled on, like the "dementia" blouse. It wasn't hard to imagine the precocious teen Anastase working his neighborhood's last nerve with such provocations. The problem is, they still look kind of adolescent. Footnote: Anastase debuted some menswear, including a black leather jacket with "Malia Obama" writ large across its back. He said that was his way of expressing his positive feelings about America's new president.
20 February 2009
If Charles Anastase's latest collection looked familiar, that's because he decided to use his London debut as an opportunity to revisit the first collection he ever showed in Paris. So there were a lot of those high-waisted, mini-crini silhouettes that once made Anastase seem like Vivienne Westwood's most ardent disciple. And, just like the first time, his mother was responsible for the little cardigans that were layered over washed-out silk pieces in the palest pastels. The look had a dreamy languor, but the designer has always managed to stay this side of saccharine by adding twinges of disturbia. After all, he cites a Degas ballerina and Lolita as inspirations, girlish extremes of innocence and experience.Those extremes were more obvious than ever here, where a crinoline floated over suspendered black thigh-highs, or silky fairy-tale layers were anchored by a tiny black leather biker jacket. The leathers highlighted a fifties "bad girl" subtext: a denim jacket with biker insignia, skinny jeans with a big red "Charles" appliquéd across the butt. Then there were the shoes, towering cork platforms rather than the usual ballet pumps. They added the element of unease to which Anastase is partial ("a little nightmare," he calls it). His approach to what it feels like for a girl is pretty close to Rei Kawakubo's. And by the way, that was Adrian Joffe, Mr. Comme des Garçons himself, in the front row.
13 September 2008
What passes for hip among the_jeunesse dorée_ of Paris right now? Based on Charles Anastase's debut collection, it's a look that's pitched somewhere between Cyndi Lauper eighties (puffball miniskirts, cropped bomber jackets) and rave culture nineties (jacket emblazoned with an acid-house smiley face, straight-out-of-Goa tie-dye silk jumpsuits). Anastase also added in a dance theme, with crop leggings, tulle skirts, and satin ballet slippers—the latter continuing the short skirt with flats trend seen last week in Milan. The oddness of this esoteric mix was only heightened by the presentation itself, which included a trio composed of Anastase's sisters Kimbilly Nina and Tamara Anna and an artist friend, Fumiko. One played clarinet, another keyboards, and the third took the mic, occasionally giving herself the odd, desultory tap on the head to add a muffled beat to the music.The question is, of course, what all of this added to the clothes. The answer: precisely nothing. Perhaps Anastase simply wanted to add some character to the proceedings—why else tie a china cup to the sleeve of a jacket?—but his collection worked best when he kept things straightforward and simple, such as the strappy evening dresses that closed the show. There's a lot of interest in the 25-year-old Anastase right now, partly because young French designers with potential are few and far between (no one has really come through since Nicolas Ghesquière), and partly because Anastase is a fashion illustrator of some repute. (He has drawn for A.P.C. and Calvin Klein, and a CD cover for Beck is in the works.) Yet the transition from drawing to designing is tricky: just look at Julie Verhoeven's short tenure at Gibo. For the time being, however, Anastase is worth watching.
3 October 2004