Marios Schwab (Q3301)
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Marios Schwab is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Marios Schwab |
Marios Schwab is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2006
creative director
Whatever Marios Schwab's reasons for his retreat from the London show calendar this season—whether it's distaste for the runway circus or, more likely, a financial setback— there was no sense of retreat in the collection he showed in a suite at the Café Royal. Schwab's focus was clearly on what cliché might call "occasion dressing." "Evening and cocktail is what they want from me," he said. There was confident new volume in lamé pannier dresses with billowing hems, and in ultra-wide pants in lustrous forest green Taroni silk, topped with a cape in crimped ostrich feathers. "I've never done romantic things before," said Schwab. But the romance had a tinge of the macabre.That's because the literal guts of the collection was still Schwab's longtime fascination with the inner workings of the human body. One dress picked out the nervous system in coral beading, another traced the torso with artery-like seams opened and filled with Swiss tulle. A short pannier dress was lined with bias-cut bands like musculature. Several looks had coils of gold jewelry built into their necklines, a new take on the metal or leather harnesses that Schwab has often liked to contain his dresses with. In this context, they looked a little like spinal columns. (The most striking was actually a harness of antique magnifying glasses.) And Schwab layered pieces, so an underdress might be in nude tulle with red corded beading like veins, which gleamed through an almost dirndl-like top layer of black muslin decorated with lamé. The effect was undeniably striking, but so overwrought as to demand the stage of the Royal Opera House rather than a seat in the audience.But Schwab is definitely un-cowed by intensity. He was inspired by the paintings of Velázquez and Francis Bacon, so the color scheme was intense: burnt orange and vermilion against black and a visceral blood red, which had a rawness that Bacon himself couldn't have bettered.
23 February 2015
The Marios Schwab show this afternoon got off to a pretty strong start with a series of crisp, menswear-inspired looks. There was a loss of momentum after that. Schwab is an intellectual designer, and this season, it got in his way. One of his key ideas was to create a kind of minimalist texture in his garments by subtly faceting the material like a gemstone. The idea was interesting in theory, and pretty low impact in practice. Likewise, Schwab's architectural slits and hemlines didn't do much to distinguish his silhouettes, though the effect proved memorable in tandem with gray granite prints, or when created via the artful draping of swaths of silk like big scarves. Given Schwab's facility as a designer of gowns and cocktail frocks, it's no surprise that this show picked up steam again as it pushed into evening looks. The tulle-covered ghost dresses with multicolor, vaguely Hellenic embroidery were a touch odd, but they didn't lack for punch. The more reserved looks were the highlight of the collection: Schwab had one idea that was solid in theoryandin practice, which was to suspend vast quantities of nude-toned tulle down the side of squared-off lengths of plain fabric and then finish the look with black bars that looked a little like gaffer tape. These looks fully expressed both the show's architectural theme and its grasping for a sense of movement. And they were relatable and elegant, too.
14 September 2014
Like a lot of intellectual designers, Marios Schwab has a tendency to overthink his collections. Which is why Resort tends to be such a good season for him—given the commercial imperatives, Schwab is forced to underthink, for once. This latest outing found him underthinking at a very high level indeed, distilling the strongest of his recent runway ideas into some really appealing clothes. Case in point, the denim, which was an emphasis here: Women are going to go mad for Schwab's little raw-edged dresses with lace inserts and/or corset-inspired shaping details. They were wearable yet distinctive, exuding low-key glam. Schwab's new soft tailoring had the same vibe, and as much panache. A green silk suit, featuring trim pants and a collarless jacket, was a grown-up take on insouciant chic. Ditto the trousers and crisscross top with a trailing back that Schwab showed for evening. The trick here seemed to be that Schwab limited himself in each piece to one key element—the cape on a blouse, or the mesh ribbon along a collar, or the tuxedo pocket on a tunic-style gown. Less thinking, more intelligence. Way to go.
2 June 2014
Has Marios Schwab been reading Rachel Kushner'sThe Flamethrowers? If so, he wasn't copping to it after his show today. But his new collection did seem to have Reno, the built-for-speed young heroine of Kushner's novel, as its muse. There was a bit of a moto theme—sharp-looking bombers and short leather miniskirts that seemed to have been pinned together at irregular angles—while a clutch of bracingly pretty bustier dresses trailed lengths of chiffon reminiscent of exhaust or airplane contrails. What Schwab did cop to backstage was an interest in "interrupting" the romance of his clothes with some realism, and vice versa, and the most intriguing of his looks here made that confrontation most explicit. Filmy long chiffon dresses in white and navy, for instance, were topped with taut black frocks. Rather matter-of-fact short dresses seemed to fall into a daydream at the shoulder, with soft asymmetrical knit attachments. This was a rather odd collection, but it grew on you—in particular, the pieces with naive crystal embellishments. In a conscientious, nonarbitrary way, Schwab seemed to have caught his clothes in the process of transforming. Much likeThe Flamethrowers, this was a coming-of-age story.
15 February 2014
That fox vs. hedgehog conceit is such a neat way of divvying up the world. And this morning's Marios Schwab show made you want to trot it out yet again. Some designers are foxes, who know many things; Schwab is manifestly a hedgehog, and he knows one big thing. And the big thing Schwab knows is the body. His new collection found him digging yet deeper into his fascination with the female form, as he sought out fresh ways of accentuating it, veiling yet revealing it, and capturing its movement. One way Schwab got at the latter was through placement prints suggestive of airbrushing, which seemed to freeze-frame some previous motion of a woman's curves. Scribblelike embroideries gave a similar impression, and the theme was important enough to Schwab that he named his collection Contours in homage. Schwab found other ways to contour the body, too, notably with belts and harnesses and even backpack straps. Meanwhile, two of the standout commercial looks here found Schwab creating a bustier effect, either by articulating the shape with little cuts and staplelike metal hardware (an element carried over from Resort) or by selectively shredding indigo-dyed denim.Elsewhere, the emphasis was on layering and playing tricks with light. Schwab has been developing these ideas for a while, but the semi-sheer T-shirt dresses reiterated the look in appealingly casual fashion, and the sequin underlayers continued to have a pleasing electricity. Schwab has a great feel for sparkle and shine, a quality recalled, yet again, by his very fine metallic belts, and the similar-looking strap hardware on his platform thong sandals. The sandals marked the latest and best outing in Schwab's ongoing collaboration with The Poet in Athens, and they ought to be a hit.
15 September 2013
Marios Schwab has been making a name for himself on the red carpet of late, so it wasn't surprising that his new collection featured an assortment of entrance-making gowns. What did come as a surprise—a pleasant one—was the casual mien of these clothes. Schwab got into the zone with his little crepe dresses, with their seemingly stapled-on sleeves; though formal, these pieces had a sense of spontaneity in their construction that made them come off as distinctly un-stuffy. He also hit on a clever idea with his cracked looks, like a strapless white cocktail frock with a fissure running down the front from which plastic blossoms emerged. It put you in mind of the way flowers will push through the pavement sometimes. The grittiness of the reference transformed a fairly standard look—a fitted cocktail frock with floral embellishment—into something with the frisson of profundity. Not all of Schwab's innovations worked as well; the gossamer lace skirt, worn over jeans, was a bit of a head-scratcher, for instance. But Schwab was more on than off here.
11 June 2013
Marios Schwab's father celebrated the female form in a straightforward way. He designed lingerie. But Marios himself has spent years exploring much more arcane options. His latest is a collaboration with Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui, who created calligrams—imaginary letters that look like beautiful but meaningless tattoos—to decorate Schwab's designs. They were the most striking elements in a collection that seemed to be all about framing the face and body as distinctively as fifteenth-century Dutch Master Petrus Christus did in the paintings that Schwab cited as an inspiration. When a designer says something like that, it can sometimes be cause for the kind of uh-oh moment that signposts the fact that his reach is just about to exceed his grasp, but in Schwab's case it was actually an appropriate cue for the grave beauty of the clothes themselves. The long-over-short proportion of beautifully cut capes and coats framed the body; the face was highlighted by a décolleté that was pristinely veiled or glistening with a patent-leather insert. And the body-conscious curl of the calligrams offered a curious, sensuous physicality.Schwab is mesmerized by fashion's power to trick the eye. The nude-but-not Jean Louis gowns worn by Marlene Dietrich in her cabaret appearances have become a touchstone for him, reflected here in evening dresses embellished with shattered mirrors. They were a reminder that Schwab has become something of a red-carpet darling of late, an extraordinary development given the spooky, brainiac intensity of his work. True, those deep, dark colors and rich, strange fabrics lend themselves to the night, but maybe Schwab's acolytes are responding to some other call of the wild. Today he showed footwear that essentially combined a ballerina slipper with a shin guard in python. Kick-ass fragility felt like a career-defining hybrid.
16 February 2013
Marios Schwab's ability to insinuate elements of his Greek heritage into his clothes is impressive. The quotes from classical dress in his show today were already part of his design signature. New was the inspiration he took from the bee, whose honey has fueled Greek culture lo these long millennia. "I've always been mesmerized by bees," Schwab admitted backstage. He found in their humble industriousness a necessary reminder of the vital nurturing connection between nature and human nature, and that Nat Geo notion was really the foundation of a collection that aimed at celebrating the tribal, the ritual, the mythic.Cha O Hawas the title Schwab gave it, which was, he said, Navajo for "in the wilderness." The Navajo and the Amazons seemed to be reference points for him. The fringing, the lacing, the slashed suedes had something of the frontier about them. The raffia felt more rain forest. The harness detailing in leather or Swarovski crystal suggested Amazon princesses. Then there was all the pleating, which echoed the chiton of ancient Greece. And don't forget the bees. Their honeycomb was a recurring visual motif. Often, all these elements came together in one outfit. It was too much. And when Schwab pleated soft, shiny skins colored in vivid shades of pink and blue, they injected an additional incongruity, looking like nothing so much as sheets of Plasticine laid across the body.Schwab thinks. He has proved himself adept at incorporating the most arcane ideas into clothes that seduce. And his source material this season was certainly as promising as any he's ever worked with. But then Schwab's instinct is overwhelmed by overthinking, and the delicate balance on which his success depends tips over. That was made clearest here in his eveningwear. Earlier this year Schwab produced some of the most erotically suggestive and memorable gowns of the season. This time, suggestion solidified into showgirl territory. With added raffia. Inconsistency is always frustrating in talent you respect and admire. The consolation is that tomorrow is another season. The bee never gives up.
15 September 2012
Given fashion's obsession with novelty, it was a bit of a shock to walk into Marios Schwab's East London studio and discover that his new collection looks, well, a lot like his last one. That's not a bad thing: Schwab has doubled down on some very good ideas, and the fact that he saw fit to do so is proof that he's hit his stride as a designer. The key idea here, as with last season, was the palimpsest layering of gossamer materials such as sheer silk and net; he worked metallic beading and sequins between the layers to create quicksilver effects or played tonal colors together to mimic the dappled look of liquid. The layering made for some very evocative, elegant eveningwear—it's no wonder his dresses have been turning up on the red carpet—but his Resort innovation was to use the technique in simpler pieces that could translate for day.Indeed, Schwab increasingly is emphasizing casual looks and separates; see the satin cigarette pant and leather skirt, elaborated with belt hardware, and the cashmere knits with cutout blob shapes (another reiteration from Fall). His casual clothes aren't exactly the kind of thing you'd spend a Sunday mooching around in, but these pieces, and the softness of the collection in general, indicate that Schwab has moved beyond his fetish for constriction and is thinking hard about comfort and ease. Perhaps the surest sign of that could be found in his signature body-con numbers: The harnessing and corsetry looked binding, but the fabric was stretch.
13 June 2012
One of the inspirations for Marios Schwab's latest collection was Marlene Dietrich. He said he was drawn to her loneliness, a suitably film noir quality for the femme fatale Schwab was once again celebrating in his designs. With her face shadowed by a cloche or wide-brim hat, in a sheath with elbow-length gloves, in a lacquered lace cocktail dress or leather trench, she was, according to Schwab, "the woman you don't know who you fall in love with." Preferably in a city like Budapest. To the designer's credit, the cinematic "woman of mystery" kitschiness of such a notion never got in the way of a collection that was a logical but spectacular extension of his Spring show's dark glamour.Fusing science and sensuality (a signature fusion, come to think of it), Schwab decorated his body-conscious shapes with mathematical patterns inspired by spirographs and harmonographs. The equation printed on his invitation was the golden ratio, the mathematical equation whose perfect balance is a symbol of perfect beauty, but what the designer insisted he was after was something "biomorphic," almost alien, with dresses molded to skin. Again, it was Dietrich who inspired him, especially the "naked" dresses Jean Louis designed for her cabaret tours in the fifties and sixties. Schwab re-created the effect with evening dresses that featured sequined sheaths glimmering under chiffon veiling, like fish scales viewed through water. They were beautiful. But the same biomorphic effect was realized in more subtle ways elsewhere, with the attention to necklines, for instance.The lasting impression of a Schwab collection is as deliciously sinister as the narcotic green accents he used in this outing. And kudos must be paid to his musical collaborators, Wladimir Schall and Rafael Wallon-Brownstone, whose dramatic, string-drenched soundtrack incorporated snatches of Mahler, Bernard Herrmann, and the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby." "All the lonely people, where do they all belong?" In Schwab's Fall fantasy, they'll be walking the boulevard of broken dreams in supremely stylish solitude.
18 February 2012
Marios Schwab struck precisely one note with his latest collection, but it was exactly the right one for him. His subject was chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and dark, and it allowed him to exercise his genetically predetermined gift for alternately revealing and concealing the female form. (Schwab's father made his living in lingerie.) The silhouette was the classic summer dress, usually sleeveless, nipped at the waist, the sort of thing Audrey Hepburn would have worn—or maybe that was just an aural cue from the burst ofCharademusic on Rafael Wallon-Brownstone's fabulous show soundtrack. But Schwab twisted that proper little piece with inserts of net and fabrics perforated to suggest the skin beneath, so his femme was rather more fatale than Audrey. There was an athletic edge to the result, too, which the designer acknowledged with the inclusion of some striking bathing suits.Schwab's shows are often stark. There was no adornment here, bar a sprinkle of Swarovski crystals across the lattice of a top. Otherwise, it was the seaming that did double duty as decoration. But the starkness had the subversive sensuality of film noir. Schwab made his women into creatures of mystery, in keeping with the chiaroscuro theme. He dressed them in feminine pastels, which he then veiled in sheer black. It sucked the life out of the colors but gave them, in return, an alluring shimmer, brought to a head in a sheer evening dress through which sequined shorts sinisterly glittered. There ain't no sunshine in Schwab's summer—it's a world of spies, lies, and double-crossing. But it will haunt the season.
17 September 2011
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
26 June 2011
Half-Greek, half-Austrian, Marios Schwab has two strains of philosophers' blood running through his veins. Sometimes you wonder if that's one too many. The designer comes across like one of those kids whose parents were always telling them, "You think too much." After his latest collection, he was talking about "the sound of craft, the humble touch of man making something."Perhaps Schwab was imagining the tap-tap-tap of an artisan punching out the brogue pattern on the bodice of one of the leather dresses that opened the show. That was one of his concessions to what the show notes referred to as the necessity of ornamentation within minimalism. Another was the use of harness straps and buckles to give the leathers added edge. The strands of pearls that defined contours of shoulder, bust, and hip were intended to convey something of the way this collection would seek to traffic in contradiction: viz lady versus rebel, East versus West. A pearl is beautiful and pristine, but it comes from its "alcove" in the slime and ugliness of an oyster. Schwab, an inveterate lover of secrets, liked the idea of an alcove in a garment, where precious pearls could be half-hidden.With that kind of abstraction at its heart, the collection often seemed cold and distant, even when there was beading that hinted at pagan scarification. That harked back to Schwab's lifelong fascination with the human body. For that matter, the traceries of pearls did as well. On one black shift, it was almost as if they were duplicating the marks a cosmetic surgeon would make before he performed a nip and tuck.When the show finished, someone posited Claude Montana, an earlier student of fashion anatomy, as a reference point. The predominance of leather, the color scheme, the classical sensibility: You could see the thinking. But the mention of scaled-up, over-the-top Montana underscored by way of contrast a kind of tentativeness in Schwab's work. When he talked about the collection as "a praise in shadow," he presumably meant something subtle and secretive to exalt his women, but he originally made his mark with clothes that were much bolder than these, and that was one positive asset that was missing today.
21 February 2011
In recent years, the drumbeat of London fashion has been, "Get the business right." The inspirational waywardness the city was once internationally recognized for took a backseat. But what is inescapable after the shows for Spring 2011 is that London's most successful fashion voices are again its most idiosyncratic. Marios Schwab is one of them. He's currently helming Halston in New York, but today he added another enigmatic chapter to his own story. "And you need to tell a story," he insisted after the show.Schwab's outré combination of lingerie, bikers, and occult symbology was actually quite logical. His father engineered women's undergarments when Marios was growing up in Athens, so he's been absorbing the terrain of the female body by osmosis since childhood. In an effort to convey a woman's many facets with this collection, he wanted the clothes to reflect femininity and toughness. Lingerie and lady bikers—what could be more graphic than that? And bikers love tattoos, which embody the idea of personal history, a Schwab fascination. Where his own bent came in was the particular kind of tattoo: pentagrams, crosses, pyramids, the all-seeing eye—surely the first time the Freemasons have been captured in couture.Did it work? Not quite. If the proper lady has been a dominant presence in fashion so far this season, her inverse, the bad girl, has been almost equally evident, and Schwab's models, with their black-rimmed eyes and shag cuts, their droopy slipdresses and biker heels, looked like real female trouble. A pink teddy with black leather pants? Yeah, that felt about right. Schwab can be an extraordinarily precise designer, and he delivered leather pieces (some provocatively harnessed) that were more Philo than floozy. But the problem was those slips. The designer deconstructed and draped them to give them more fluidity and visual interest, but there was something dangerously cheap—or cheaply dangerous—about the result.
20 September 2010
Projecting himself into a new idiom for Halston in New York got Marios Schwab thinking more about his own half-Austrian identity for the collection he shows in his adopted London. "I was the only boy in the sewing school in the Annahof Schule in Salzburg! I had this kind of nostalgia for the ladies who taught me, and who dressed in traditional dirndls on a Sunday. It made me think about working on décolletés," he said backstage. "Oh, and the Steiff teddy bears I had as a kid."It was hardlyThe Sound of Music, but with its buttoned-up collarless white blouses under swooping necklines, you could literally see where Schwab was coming from. Most of the looks had long sleeves, with only the legs kept exposed, and all detail was concentrated above a raised waist: bolero jackets, bodices crisscrossed with lacing, and steel clips transposed from the desginer's favorite pair of climbing boots.If it didn't quite have the impact of Schwab's first contributions to shaping the body-con movement four years ago, it showed he's keeping a grip on designing the kind of pieces retailers ask him for. And the teddy-fur coat? Several of those have been popping up in avant-garde collections this Fall, so he's dead-on with that.
21 February 2010
Everything Marios Schwab designs comes about only after he's gone through several rounds of intellectual inquiry and striven to articulate something about the way we're living today. This time, his drive was to find "a new way of looking at bohemian dressing," a mission that meant he was going to challenge himself to get away from the short and tight body-con dresses he helped bring into fashion, but which have now become tedious. "I started with period costume, looking at maids' muslin skirts and suiting," he said, detailing how he'd then divided the body into three zones to try to invent a new proportion that didn't look retro.Schwab laid out the foundation of his thesis by sending out three "whole" versions of the garment templates he would then proceed to chop up: a puffy, bunchy, pale peach dress; a lavender organza pantsuit; and a vertically knife-pleated beige silk dress. After that, the essay proper started, with multiple variations on cropped tops over pleated midsections with wispy, bunchy skirts floating beneath.The intention was to find a designed parallel to the way women will mismatch, say, a man's blazer with a soft dress. "There are no rules, no one fashion anymore—this is the way of dressing now," Schwab said. The question is: Did his rearrangements of silhouettes work beyond the drawing board? Not wholly. Some of the torso-centered French-blind heavy satin pleating looked awkward, forced, even borderline ugly. Had it come fused onto the more diaphanous skirts to make dresses, Schwab might really have been in trouble, but fortunately the skirts are separate pieces—and quite possibly will underpin his collection as next season's commercial money-spinners.
20 September 2009
One of the tests of really interesting fashion is whether you feel you've never seen anything quite like it before. Marios Schwab's Fall collection had that quality. It started from an intellectual investigation into various forms of expansion, running from the workings of the human body to the geological forms of crystals and minerals when they crack open, revealing themselves within stones. Nevertheless, you could read all that in the program notes and still get no idea of what the outcome would be in terms of clothes. As it was, Schwab's opening section of double-layer dresses—a larger size on top of a smaller size in a single silhouette—with half-circle Swarovski stones embedded in the necklines, looked great. They were followed by even more strangely dramatic pieces of tailoring and dresses in which fissures seemed to break open to reveal crystalline interiors. The technical rigor involved in cutting these pieces put Schwab back on track as one of the London designers who are pushing forward through lines of inquiry other than the standard historical references. It did lead him to offer a one-length collection that has only one end use—as cocktail party wear—but whoever chooses from this collection will own something exceptional.
22 February 2009
In the past three or four seasons, Marios Schwab has brought a precocious level of rigorous, scientific thinking and research to his runway. This season, however, he moved away from one-note drama, like last Spring's anatomical dissection, to a collection that touched on many themes—the draped Greek chiton, the rope-bound "wrapping" work of Christo, a bit of the beige-suede eighties, and some sportswear.In other words, it was confusing. What were drapey jersey gowns and all-in-ones doing in the same breath as structured, cutout suede dresses or, indeed, printed T-shirts? Backstage Schwab's explanation didn't fully articulate what was going on. He might've thought that it's a good time to sell accessibly—along with those printed T-shirts, there were swimsuits and drapey beach cover-ups that could find their way into any boutique. That sort of brand extension is a first for Schwab, but with a top line of items that are going to be a tough sell (a jersey jumpsuit slashed open from the ankle all the way up the inside of the leg, for one), it's hard to know whether it's going to have anything more than a lukewarm appeal.
14 September 2008
London is thinking long—sinuously, serpentinely long in the case of Marios Schwab's incredibly impactful Fall silhouette. Schwab is the first to completely nail the new look in a bravely exaggerated form: smooth, tubular, hobbling stretch dresses to the ankle, with strange textures breaking through their surfaces. Some of them had patches of under-things—jeans or poufy upswellings of flesh-colored Lycra—rising through roughly scissored slits. Others were covered with filigree-fine laser cutouts engineered to look like sooty, flaking Victorian William Morris wallpaper.It was strange, it was sinister—and mesmerizing. Without doubt, it threw up a glaring issue about how anyone could wear it as is (if you wanted to perambulate across a room within five minutes, forget it). But by the end, the cumulative effect neutralized that kind of pragmatic niggle. This was Schwab's most conceptual collection yet, arguably one that is powerful enough to push the reset button in how we see proportions.What led him here was a reading of a Victorian proto-feminist novel,The Yellow Wallpaper,by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by a collaboration with the artist Tom Gallant on the prints. Those influences scarcely matter to the results, though, which look new and "out there" in a way few designers dare in these days of commercial constraints. Not that there weren't salable-looking, impeccably made navy peacoats (two, tramline straight, were elongated to hit the ankle). The point is that this is one of those symbolically charged collections that may be a bellwether. Longer is beginning to feel better: It's a visual that's been moving inward from the margins since Roland Mouret and Jonathan Saunders also dropped their hemlines to mid-calf. If it seems crazy now, let's wait and see: The judgment call will only come after every other designer has had his say.
11 February 2008
There's always been something in the sharpness of Marios Schwab's cut that puts you in mind of scalpels and the hand-eye coordination of a surgeon. That latent interest in the science of the body rose fully to the surface in his Spring collection. From his first dress—a T-shirt shift with a thermo-image of body-generated heat in front and a digital print of something organic on the arms—it was apparent that "body-conscious" was about to go somewhere the late eighties never delved: under the skin.But before the squeamish send up the red flags, let's pretend we haven't been informed about Schwab's fascination with early anatomical dissection manuals and microphotography of bone and viscera. Scrub that prior knowledge, and what's left is a collection of scrolled-back, sculptural black body braces over lovely pink-, yellow-, and black-hued fluid prints: modern things that are young, strong, and feminine all at the same time. These were followed by a multitude of dresses, some in draped jersey, others in fluttery silk, that mark a distinct move toward prettiness, as well as a more forgiving fit. One such dress had a stunning back view, in which a jacket was elegantly sliced open to reveal a zipper spine and black pearls denoting ribs beneath. Others came with external body jewelry derived from internal structures of veins and nerves, though never to shock effect. As a creamy crinkled dress, delicately strung over with pearls, left the runway, it was clear that Schwab had managed to sublimate all of his academic research into something that could really add to the sum of joy of smart, young womanhood.
16 September 2007
Marios Schwab has the right instincts about moving away from the neon-bright, body-conscious, early nineties vibe with which he and Christopher Kane ignited new interest in London last year. The challenge lies in gauging the speed at which to do it, and in successfully developing some fresh angles that feel true and sincere—all while offering something sensible to sell in the bargain.He opened his collection with a hexagonally pieced nip-waist jacket with a curve in the back that stood away from the body like a geodesic dome. Cutting hexagons and mathematically fitting them around the human form is a pastime Schwab devised last summer, and now he¿s applying it to puffers. Cut into hourglass shapes and skating dresses, these carried a distinct air of Gaultier Junior, circa 1989. They were also the designer's personal response to the futuristic-sporty agenda that¿s been in the air since last fall.Schwab is too methodical about weaving in new strands of thought to leave it at that. He¿s also working on a fresh approach to dresses. He should. The tight body-line ones, even with new iridescent metal plates worked into the bodice, are beginning to be yesterday¿s news. More interesting were the soft asymmetries he wrapped into sport-fleece tops and scarf-lashed necklines (a reference to Romeo Gigli, perhaps?). Some of this read as a work in progress, but with the intense Schwab, it¿s guaranteed he¿ll have developed it into more sophisticated form next season.
12 February 2007
Out of all the exuberant young talents in London, Marios Schwab is the one bringing restraint and rigorous cutting skills to fashion's we-love-the-nineties party. Having carved out an advanced statement about curvy, corseted, Alaïa-inspired dressing in two seasons of mini shows with the Fashion East collective, this Greek-Austrian designer is now thinking about where it all goes next. "Instead of doing this body-tight thing everyone's talking about," he said, "I wanted to manipulate curves in a different way."He worked that out partly with math, piecing hexagonal patchworks into subtly faceted, slightly standaway surfaces on his signature bra-top dresses. From there, he experimented with light layers of print floating over a contrasting underdress, and, less successfully, a section of power-mesh draping. One of Schwab's underlying interests, as befits the son of a bra-factory engineer, is the superstructure of lingerie, and it reappeared in the boned bustle detail protruding from a bandanna-print gown. In a move toward unfussy romanticism and lightness, he also showed a couple of faded rose-print dresses, neat to the waist, but with sculptural, airy volume in back.Many of these were quietly outstanding pieces extraordinary to see coming from the hand of someone so young. It was still his first solo show, though, and in some ways, his anxiety to prove his worthiness led him to overextend himself. He needn't have made quite so many dresses; after the first few, the audience was sold, but before long, ready to leave. The show, through no fault of Schwab's, ran an unacceptable two hours late because of delays caused by other designers.
19 September 2006
You have to look carefully to find London's twenty-first century talents. Like Marios Schwab, they're emerging slowly and deliberately from behind the scenes, learning from (or perhaps rebelling against) the mistakes made by their loudmouth nineties forebears. Schwab, though, has just as strong a vision—curvaceously body-seamed cuts, gorgeous fabrics, and meticulously beautiful finishes—as anyone who rocked London with their theatrical antics a decade ago.Right now, young London stylists and editors are buzzing about the short sexy dresses of Versace and Alaïa. Schwab, a Greek/Austrian designer, is one of the few capable of rechanneling that enthusiasm into clothes that don't look embarrassingly retro. His short hourglass dresses in double-knit jersey, silk velvet, or gold and black brocade, come embellished with fronds of gold metalwork that curve around the bust. Other looks bespeak a fascination with the techniques of old-fashioned corsetry: A high-waisted skirt has a girdle panel in the front, and a seemingly stark little black dress turns to reveal a curvy bustle and erotic insets of lace in the small of the back. Schwab is humble—and sensible—enough to participate in a joint show organized by Fashion East, this time in the civilized surroundings of Terence Conran's Bluebird restaurant in Kings Road. Next season he should fly solo.
16 February 2006