Mary Katrantzou (Q3324)
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Mary Katrantzou is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Mary Katrantzou |
Mary Katrantzou is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2008
designer
A photograph of the designer and writer Pauline de Rothschild in her bedroom, with its hand-painted chinoiserie panels of flowering plants and trees, was Mary Katrantzou’s starting point for pre-fall. “This season,” she said, “I was really looking at this connection between interiors and exteriors”—hence Rothschild’s “trompe l’oeil conservatoire,” and other dresses depicting ceiling cornices out of an Italian palazzo and formal gardens of the sort seen at Versailles.Trompe l’oeil motifs are a longstanding signature of Katrantzou’s, and some of her followers might experience déjà vu flipping through this look book. That is entirely intentional. “We always reintroduce a print from our archive. When you’ve been in the game for 15 years; they’re almost vintage,” she said with a laugh.Recently named the creative director of leather goods and accessories at Bvlgari, Katrantzou also designed the gowns worn by performers at the Olympic flame handover ceremony at the Temple of Hera in Greece earlier this year. The dresses boasted trompe l’oeil details of their own in the form of black and white Doric columns, like relics out of ancient Olympia. “The idea was to take inspiration from the environment itself and play on the idea that, at the acropolis, the actual columns are women. They’re symbols of the strength of women.” She reported that she received some customer requests for special orders but had to decline them. “We had to explain that they were a gift for the Olympic committee and also for Greece.”Here, the motifs are more subdued and more traditionally feminine. The silhouettes also tend to be simple—tried-and-true instead of experimental. This is seen in a fluid caftan and a fitted midi-length tank dress which also features embroidery. That’s wisdom gleaned from experience; a bold print makes extreme shapes unnecessary. It may indeed be something she learned from that favorite photo of Rothschild’s bedroom, which is notably spare save for those detailed chinoiserie panels.
23 July 2024
For resort, Mary Katrantzou went back to familiar territory, finding inspiration in architectural interiors. “We were looking at mid-century light artists like Paolo Venini, at all these intricate designs but filtering them into prints that looked like they’re florals,” Katrantzou said on a Zoom from her home in Greece. Fittingly, the lookbook was photographed in the opulent Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens, which has a special meaning for the designer. “My grandmother was a ceramicist and a lighting artist and she designed all the lighting for the hotel; so there’s a nice play between the prints that inspired the collection and the work of my grandmother, which is now considered part of the history of the hotel.”Katrantzou and her team extracted the most ornate decorations of lamps and chandeliers and turned them into prints and embellishments that emphasized the opulent and lush textures, with an added focus on trompe l’oeil techniques to fool the eye. Take an ultramarine silk gown with an attached floor-length cape featuring an all-over jeweled floral embellishment that one had to zoom in on—like, really zoom in—to see that the jewels were in fact a print. Similarly, a caftan-style gown had the look of dark teal velvet, but was in fact printed on a lightweight silk. A white floral and gold filigree print read as daytime on an easy dress with draped sleeves, while its evening counterpart “came alive” with gold embroidery on an all-over white sequin background. “We don’t do a lot of ivory or white because most of our clients expect audacious color and bold color combinations,” she explained. “When we work with tone-on-tone it’s an opportunity to be as 3D as possible with the print, so that the woman is getting so much from the print she doesn’t have to rely on color.”The interplay with texture and surface was also a chance to work with “exotics” like mock croc skin, which she used to great effect on a series of easy knee-length shift dresses. “We would never use exotics in this day and age, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t beauty in the shine or in the patternation of it,” she said.
30 November 2023
Mary Katrantzou’s latest collection—which brings together both her namesake line, and Mary Mare, the “year-round resort” offering she launched in 2020—was inspired by a deeply personal event in her life: her son’s baptism. But you won’t find a collection of delicate white lace and babydoll silhouettes here; instead the designer was riffing on the table settings she created for the christening “after-party.”“It all started because I was designing plates in the primary colors that you find on children’s playmats, for the art de la table we did for the christening,” she said on a Zoom from her studio in Greece. The prints themselves are taken from her bespoke ceramics—which you can see in the lookbook as set design. She also lifted details from other decorative pieces; the “perforation stripe” that has become a frequent motif, is a reinterpretation of the frilled edge of postal stamps.The red group featured a mix of florals and butterflies combined with a scalloped pattern inspired by the little bread and butter plates. On a loose, caftan-esque silhouette it had a studied ease, while on a long sleeve mini dress it looked fun and youthful. In the blue group, a floral print that cheekily paired butterflies, star fish, and turtles was turned into an elegant maxi dress with an embellished floral beaded trim at the collar—the epitome of glamorous resort wear. Additional highlights included an easy shirt dress and a caftan in a “collaged” print that brings together all of the primary color floral prints, as well as a pleated striped skirt and matching swimsuit that really captured that carefree summer feeling.Katrantzou has a healthy occasionwear business, and in the yellow group, a silk bias cut slip dress with all-over beaded motif of yellow flowers and butterflies on the bust had just enough ’90s appeal, while a mint green silk gown with garden-inspired embellishments at the bust brought to mind simple-yet-grand ball gowns from the 1950s and ’60s.“We’ve been growing our bespoke business quite exponentially actually. The show we did at the Temple of Poseidon was our first foray into couture, and during Covid we had a lot of clients that came to us, inspired by that collection who allowed us to design a lot of pieces for them,” she said. “I think this collection bridges the two where, you know, it’s evening, but it’s still a ready-to-wear offering at a more democratic price point.”
17 July 2023
For millennia, people have climbed the steep promontory at the southernmost tip of Greece to worship at the Temple of Poseidon—drawn by its significance in myth and its monumental witness to human endeavor—and to breathe in the infinite blue of the Aegean beyond. But there’s never been a temple procession like the one last night—the women trailing multicolored gowns, the national dignitaries, the super-wealthy philanthropists, and Anne-Marie, the Queen of Greece herself. They were wending their way to witness a piece of Greek history being made: Mary Katrantzou’s ceremonial offering to the health of the Greek nation.Well, what could a designer do to match the enormity of the occasion? A show which touched on the values of couture to project the living resonance of Greek culture throughout Western civilization—the capstone to a fashion season which has often sought to bring the emotional and rational meanings of the past to present relevance. Much has been talked about escapism and craftsmanship as a justification for high-skilled fashion, but Katranzou’s show was a joining of the other argument that concerns young designers: that fashion should also somehow serve the concerns of humanity and community. Katrantzou had joined hands with Mrs. Marianna Vardinogiannis to raise funds on a national and international platform for the Elpida Association, her charity for children with cancer, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary.Thus, government permission was granted for Katranzou’s rainbow odyssey through Greek achievement. It was embedded everywhere in the dresses that proceeded from the temple. “I wanted to use ideas that were birthed here, in the 5th century before Christ when the temple was built,” Katrantzou said, “philosophy, theology, biology, astronomy, trigonometry. Ideas that are so abstract—words that were birthed here two and a half thousand years ago—and the wonder that they can be so relevant today.”Nowhere was the point made as meaningfully as with the dress which bore the universal emblem of medicine on its bodice: silver-embroidered serpents, entwined around a staff. There was another that spoke to justice via an allusion to peplos pleating in a stone-colored dress with a jeweled bra in the shape of scales.
Each dress was its own entity, one with spiraling numbers representing the infinity of Pi, another spangled with a map of the heavens, a tabard studded with compasses, alluding to Greece as the culture which spread throughout the globe via its ancient seafaring prowess.
4 October 2019
Mary Katrantzou worked with the themes of elemental natural forces for her Fall collection. “Earth, air, fire, water.” Perhaps this theme was important to know, perhaps not so much. The most apparent thing about her collections these days is how much Katrantzou has become a demi-couturier. Her show, with its rainbow color palette and exuberant use of ruffles and ostrich feathers seemed to place her somewhere in line with the social history of British couture—a decorative mantle passed on by the likes of Zandra Rhodes and the London dressmakers of the ’70s and ’80s.Except in Katrantzou’s time, her line reaches a far more internationally based clientele, some of whom collect her work, season by season as souvenirs of her themes, almost as they also buy works of art. Strangely, then, the most extravagant pieces in this collection can be judged as her most commercial—such as the intensely beaded, multicolored dresses smothered in swirlingly collaged motifs of flowers and vegetation. In an era where mass production makes less and less sense for either designers or for wealthy consumers seeking rarity, this is increasingly the way planet fashion is spinning.
16 February 2019
Ten years ago, just as Lehman Brothers was crashing and the world plunged into the subprime mortgage–driven financial crisis, Mary Katrantzou dared stick her head above the fashion parapet and show a little rack of trompe l’oeil shift dresses with digitally printed jewelry on the front. Against all the odds in that gloom-laden economic climate, international buyers smiled on her collection, and her risk paid off.And look at her now! Filling the Roundhouse rock venue with a walkingwunderkammerof a collection of sparkling demi-couture clothes. “A collection about collections,” she called it, though she might have well have said a collection about collectors.In her decade in business, Katrantzou has built up a worldwide network of private customers and acquired a Chinese investor, Wendy Yu. They have given her a base from which to really go for it with her anniversary show. Instead of releasing literal replicas of her favorite looks, she hybridized elements “like a flip-book” from her collections about stamps and banknotes, heraldic embroidered badges, interiors, objets d’art, gardens, insects, and more. In these incarnations, just about everything looked lighter, less stiff, and more luxe than ever.In the first few dresses on the stamp theme, the overlapping pieces seemed articulated in movement. Images laid out in grids were linked together with strips of transparent lace. They shimmered with micro-beaded embroidery as they walked. In the wunderkammer section, fluted dresses were printed with butterflies or flower specimens, the sizes of the exhibits engineered to shrink toward waistlines or shoulders.It’s amusing to think that many of these objects might have been inspired by what Katrantzou has observed as a guest in the residences of her clientele. Whereas once a collection was triggered by seeing Fabergé eggs in a Russian museum, now she knows the kind of people who own Fabergé. Texas has particularly embraced Katrantzou’s brand of quirky maximalism. Women in Dallas, especially, have bought her work in depth, season after season, as they have occasions to wear it. Putting together a retrospective at Dallas Contemporary Museum last year was easy, she said, because clients were happy to lend back their Katrantzou archives. “It is encouraging to have that validation,” she admitted.And this season, she pushed forward even more extravagantly.
There were things that even her biggest fans haven’t yet seen, such as a transparent blow-up jacket packed with imitation coral and seaweed, worn over a white tulle dress smothered in embroidered flowers. It was so pretty it could be a wedding dress. As for the surreal sea-life–filled jacket—it’s not hard to imagine one of her collectors wanting to own that, too. Apparently, they are women with a sense of humor who revel in attracting attention in a room. Katrantzou’s pair of dresses dubbed Harry and Winston, with their frontage laid out as if they were jewelry trays, would be great party conversation starters.The show was emotional. A newfound friend of Katrantzou’s is Vangelis, her great Greek musician compatriot, famous for composing the soundtrack toBlade Runnerand other films. He gave her unpublished tracks to play on her 10th “birthday.” At the end, a long printed crystal dress with an image of the Shalimar perfume bottle echoed—or rather grandly amplified—the memory of the first shift dress the young Jourdan Dunn wore to open Katrantzou’s first show. Did you need to know this? No, but for Mary Katrantzou’s family and friends, it was a joyful landmark of just how far she’s come.
15 September 2018
Mary Katrantzou is always at her best when she’s busy decorating. In her Fall collection, Interior Lives, she remembered that’s where she started out—with a lampshade skirt and trompe l’oeil prints of ornate homes surreally superimposed on shift dresses. “Well, this time I was looking at the beginnings of modernism—its roots in William Morris, up to the Bauhaus,” she said today. So then, she was off, doing her thing of importing unrelated objects into her collection inventory.In the Katrantzou abode, we find Gobelins tapestry wrapped around dresses or patched into corsets on coats; the patterns of arts-and-crafts encaustic tiles in faux fur coats, pointillist paintings (made in glass beads) on knits, Victorian drapes swagged around shoulders of a shimmering evening column, William Morris wallpaper scissored into collages, and a silver suit of armor converted into a jacket. There was even a corner for a standard lamp that recalled Katrantzou’s earliest hit.These days, Katrantzou has relaxed a lot of her shapes for ease of wear, including a variety of midi dresses. That, presumably, makes her work more salable for everyday purposes. But, to be honest, it’s her showpieces that are always somehow the most believable. There are many women who live in very grand houses who collect Katrantzou’s work. It’s easy to imagine one or two of them feeling absolutely at home in the drapes dress, and that super-special, richly jeweled and embroidered Renaissance portrait jacket.
18 February 2018
The pastimes of childhood were Mary Katrantzou’s inspiration for Spring. “I’m an ’80s baby!” she laughed, as she rifled through a list of toys and games she played with as a little girl in Athens. “Lego, Spirograph, paint-by-numbers books, balloons, marbles, Hama beads.” Unconsidered everyday objects have always been her starting points for print, color, and embroidery. She led the way in London’s renaissance in print and color—a generational surge of doom-defying creativity which emerged to lift the spirits during the financial crash of 2008. Now that times are dark again, her aesthetic antidotes are all the more compelling the madder and brighter they get.Her finale dresses were an exuberant morphing of blown-up printed and over-sequinned flowers, a puffy-skirted Cristóbal Balenciaga ’50s gown, and a hot air balloon showcasing all her talents. At the other end of the spectrum, the paint-by-numbers florals were put to service on sporty nylon rainwear. Lord knows the recent summer has put women everywhere in need of that category of garment. They might well give Katrantzou a new income stream come Summer 2018. On the other hand, the big, extravagant dresses which Katrantzou is so good at when she lets rip with her embellishment are bound to be seen much sooner: They’re celebrity red carpet catnip.
17 September 2017
Mary Katrantzou is a talent whose eye zooms in on overlooked trifles, adding her psychedelic filters, distortions, and double-take visual puns to build up colorful collections. Here, she shows her hand for Pre-Fall – almost literally. The prints in her lookbook released today are, she says, “based on the patterns on the backs of playing cards, which probably no one notices very much, but which are so varied and amazing when you do start to study them.”This repertoire of card tricks leads off in several directions. One is a thought line which included Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau’s surrealism, and thence to Elsa Schiaparelli, and her card-in-hand embroideries. Perhaps it was the '30s/'40s thread that made her imagine Hollywood femme fatales languidly playing cards in nightclubs. Pictures of the young Lauren Bacall on her pinboard triggered a glamorous set of retro-flavored crepe dresses in punchy petrol blue and salmon pink, accessorized with fox stoles. Style-wise, they’re Katrantzou’s winning hand for early fall cocktail and evening.But this is a collection, dropped into stores from June to September, that must run the gamut of occasions and climates, stretching all the way from silk pajamas through breezy chiffon and long, tiered skirts, to tailoring and tweeds. Katrantzou worked traditional turn-of-the-century William Morris-type prints on autumnal tailoring, coats, and a long medieval-looking high-waisted evening dress, applying breezier, warm-weather versions to easy dresses and flounced maxi skirts – a winning suit for summer vacation purchases, right now.
15 May 2017
At the end of the Victorian era, Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild, devoted some of the banking dynasty’s riches to his interest in zoology, amassing a vast private collection that formed the natural history museum he opened to the public at Tring in 1892. Last summer, Mary Katrantzou was invited by the present baron, Jacob Rothschild, to use her psychedelic design talents to take part in “Creatures & Creations,” an exhibition celebrating his ancestor’s collection. Later, Katrantzou returned to Waddesdon Manor, the family’s neo-Renaissance Victorian country pile outside London (which was bequeathed to the National Trust and is open to visitors) to shoot her Resort collection, which, one thing leading to another, came out of her visual immersion in the Rothschild world. Here, we see it, on the loose in the ornate interiors and formal gardens—patterns of feather and exotic flowers, liberal lashings of lamé, glittering sequins, and multicolored stripes galore. It’s a buy-now collection designed to hold its own at country house dinners and holiday parties around the world. Wildlife apart, those are the natural habitats so many of Katrantzou’s international customers fit right into these days.
27 October 2017
Mary Katrantzou dived into the world of Walt Disney’sFantasia—his 1940 surreal cartoon animation film—while she was designing her Fall collection. The spectacular oceans of moving color and pattern must have seemed like a natural habitat for a designer who has made so much of manipulating prints in the computer age. Still, with Katrantzou, following one strand is never enough. Possibly it was the date of the Disney release that made her also start working up silhouettes influenced by ’40s film noir, big shoulders, furs, and checked tweed suiting. Katrantzou is culturally connected. For her show at Tate Modern, she had the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra tucked away in a corner playing live.In any event, this collection could have used more color, more exuberance, more of Katrantzou’s former downright creative weirdness to carry the occasion. Approval for things comes in waves. After her explosively innovative beginnings as the first designer to elevate digital print to an art form, Katrantzou swiftly backed away when the mass market began exploiting it. Since then, she’s been repositioning herself as a designer who decorates surfaces and does tailoring, too. In this collection, there were prints and beaded embroideries inspired byFantasia’ssoundwaves, bugle beads and whirring buttons sewn in grids on sugary pastel coats, and cartoony landscapes in which the Little Mermaid and the Little Centaur popped up.Yet counterintuitively this feels like a time when the eye, even the soul, longs for a bit of out-there madness and daring from fashion. Katrantzou has her commercial bases covered by now; she has proven she can be wearable. Now that she doesn’t have to think so much about pleasing customers with her every look, it would be great to see her get back to giving the world some of the arty, print-y, astonishing showpieces that blew people’s minds in the first place.
19 February 2017
If you feel as if Resort has been going on practically all year, you’re not wrong. In 2016, Resort, Cruise, Pre-Spring collections—call them what you will—have taken what is surely a record-breaking seven months, starting with Chanel’s Cuba show in May and ending with the release ofMary Katrantzou’s pictures now, in November. Katrantzou, like a growing number of designers, decided to delay the release of her imagery until her clothes were delivered, so what you see here is the lineup as edited down by store buyers.What the buyers bet on is a representation of Katrantzou’s punchy, swirly color, with a smattering of prints of miniature cheetahs, buckles, and leather straps derived, she says, “from research on vintage scarves, ties, and trunks.” Though she has put her talent for trompe l’oeil mostly on the back burner, it flares up again for a second here, in the generous fan pleating on a circle skirt that opens to show radiating prints that are literally composed of old-school neckties. Elsewhere, Katrantzou’s work has gone into constructing textiles. Striped coats and jackets turn out to be sewn from faille ribbons in contrasting colors, and there are innovative jacquard techniques, like gold thread woven into denim in toile de Jouy patterns. Perhaps that detail is hard to perceive in photos? Not to worry: These pieces are of course imminently ready to be viewed in person.
9 November 2016
There is an affliction of the creative mind that sometimes makes people stop valuing what comes easily and naturally to them. No matter that everyone else thinks their talent is astonishing, and praises them for it, at some point an inner voice says: “But I'm not just that. Look, I can do this, and this too!”Mary Katrantzouhas suffered from a touch of that condition lately, striving to stretch and prove herself beyond what she was originally known for. But with her Spring collection, she snapped back to own who she is: a great print designer, and a Greek one, at that—which is good.“It’s funny, I never wanted to use classical Greek art, because being from there, it seemed too obvious,” she said with a shrug after her show. “But this time, I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” She looked back to her childhood visit to the ancient palace of Knossos, on Crete, the center of the Minoan civilization, which historians guess, from the visual evidence of artifacts and frescoes, was a culture run by women. So this was one of Katrantzou’s angles, the profiles of Minoan priestesses or goddesses (no one knows exactly), which appear in Cretan murals and the silhouetted paintings on Greek vases and plates, which she transposed onto the bodices of dresses, and, in a couple of cases, printed onto shimmery chain-mail tunics.Katrantzou said she was also triggered by the words of a girlfriend who happened to remark, “Your work is so psychedelic!” She’d not seen her many-layered digital compositions that way before, but it led her to search out the trippy graphics of late-’60s and early-’70s music posters. So it went: Swirly prog-rock patterns met the symbols of the ancient Greek world in flared trousers and stretch T-shirts, layered under lots of the embellished dresses that have become Katrantzou’s signature.Allowing herself to explore that instinctive synthesis worked well for Katrantzou. Some of her visual devices recalled her earliest trompe l’oeil collections, which flatter and exaggerate the female shape by driving the eye toward the waist. Later, she moved into more free-flowing evening skirts, with Greek key patterns intersected with chiffon inserts, and jackets and tops embroidered with doves and olive branches. Following her instincts served to reaffirm who she is, as well as to put this collection on one of the wavelengths tuned into the ’70s vibe that is cropping up in fashion generally.
18 September 2016
Mary Katrantzouspoke about falling in love backstage at her show—or rather, a child’s first passion for dressing up, be it as a cowboy or a ballerina. What evolved out of that was Katrantzou’s own romance—an early commitment to American ’50s Western styling with the first look, a boxy menswear check jacket with cowboy shirt leather detailing appliquéd across the shoulders.Katrantzou has had far more elaborate, almost psychedelically out-there, inspirations before—merges of imagery whose logic you can barely follow, but whose results become magically original. This one gave her room for expanding on embellishment and textile techniques, but the chief logic of this collection seemed to be pointed in another direction—at proving that Katrantzou is a designer who can do wearable day pieces as well as incredible party dresses. Since starting her business in 2008, she has captured young upscale customers who love her cocktail dresses and red carpet eveningwear, but what does Mary Katrantzou everydaywear look like?The designer made a good case for a tooled leather pencil skirt, and the slightly pervy blouse—a sheer black polka-dot one, and a chestnut ciré silk yoked version—all of them “off” enough to be cool. At the end, there was a finale of extravagant dresses in tulle, several of which could find their way to the Oscars. But actually, it was the simple shirtdresses with manically jeweled panels on the front that came out as the winners.
21 February 2016
The big surprise inMary Katrantzou’s new Pre-Fall lineup was a double-face cashmere cape, gray on the outside and camel on the inside and as minimal as anything she has ever done. The second biggest surprise? A matching flounced skirt. Since her 2008 beginnings, Katrantzou has excelled at print and embellishment—her latest runway show was a master class in both—but tempting though it may have been, she’s mostly steered clear of streamlined simplicity until now. Stores like to put designers in neat little boxes, and Katrantzou’s has always been the maximalist one.Bristling at such boundaries, and with a new CEO (formerly ofThom BrowneandAlexander McQueen) who is encouraging her to broaden her offering, Katrantzou explored new avenues for Pre-Fall. The double-face cashmere was just one of the developments. She’s rarely been one for a long dress, but the new collection featured several. In one-piece and two-piece styles, their fluid ease would be a refreshing sight on this Sunday’sGolden Globesred carpet. A more structured jumpsuit with a cutout bustline is reportedly already in Los Angeles on a celebrity stylist’s rack.The starting point for the collection was ’60s sci-fi and books by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. These produced embroidered, mixed-print dresses that will prove more familiar to Katrantzou’s followers. Nothing wrong with that.
6 January 2016
It is weird—a sort of barely conceivable telescoping of time—to realize thatMary Katrantzougraduated fromCentral Saint Martins, M.A., in 2008 with precisely 10 shift dresses, each of them digitally printed with oversize images of jewelry (the evidence is in the archives ofVogue Runway). Well, look at her now, seven years on, filling the atrium on the Central Saint Martins campus with a large, immensely intricate body of work framed around Roma gypsy dress and cosmic stargazing—all of it visible in a vast mirror that reflected the lineup into infinity.The G-forces exerted on any designer whose business has taken off so rapidly—Katrantzou sells around the world now—are extreme. But the remarkable thing about her is how she has adapted over that time, always carefully paying attention to critical feedback as she speeds forward. After breaking new territory with digital trompe l’oeil prints, which all too swiftly became a widespread style throughout the fashion world, she turned away from her computer and went into handcrafted embellishment. When people criticized her for being a decorator, she moved on to experimenting with sculpted shape. And when the response to that hinted that her experiments might be getting too cumbersome, she came back with what she presented tonight: a collection that combined tiny flower prints, micro sequins, and metallic quilting in weightlessly fluttery forms.It is interesting—maybe even disturbing—to wonder why so many designers in Europe have been thinking about the folkloric costume traditions of the peoples of the Balkans, Romania, Hungary, and farther east. Can it be that the consciousness of mass migrations in the daily news is ending up processed into floral prints and collaged patchworks on pretty, fashionable dresses? If so, then Katrantzou is not the only designer or label that has become porous to those subconscious influences. Mini-rose prints on a black background even turned up on theTopshop runwayfour hours before Katrantzou’s show and, before that, in many variations, in the British designer Stuart Vevers’sCoachcollection in New York City last week.But Katrantzou, in her intelligent way, senses the danger of being boxed into a trend. In this outing, she also showed she can take on the challenge of proving she’s able to design without print, without color,andwithout embroidery or texture.
Her passage of pieces involving solid black material, cut with couture-like exactitude into A-line skirts and fit-and-flare coat silhouettes, was surprising yet instantly desirable. Compared with the clothes she was making when she came out of CSM, this collection bore almost no relation stylistically. The only link between the two is lodged in Katrantzou’s constantly self-challenging brain. And the intellectual result, whatever it might be, elevated this season to another plane.
20 September 2015
As designers go, Mary Katrantzou is a pointed mix of pragmatist and dreamer. "It's easier to sell a pre-collection when it's less specific," she said as she was fishing through a rack of clothes that, if not necessarily as theme-driven as some of her past triumphs, was still a remarkable elaboration on a handful of idiosyncratic visual elements. The Welsh band Stereophonics, for instance, will never set the world alight with their journeyman pub-rock, but once upon a time they had an album sleeve of fluoro stripes that has lingered with Katrantzou until this very moment, when she could infect her Resort 2016 collection with sunray pleats that gaped to reveal a world of hidden color.OK, there wasn't a theme as such, but Katrantzou was fascinated by the way op art artists of the 1960s used stripes and depth of color to trick the eye. Pleats were the perfect way to extend the deception. They allowed for lots of movement, which defined this collection the way embroidery used to for Katrantzou. The effect was especially striking when the single slit on a skirt opened to reveal an entire dancing concertina. She tiered pleats in separates for added mobility. And she also ran the stripes horizontally and in diagonal rainbows.But that wasn't the only story she was telling. What says the coming of spring more than flowers? Katrantzou immersed herself in research and typically came up for air with something as left field as the artwork on French seed packets from the 1890s, so hyper-real in their color schemes that they sat quite comfortably with the op art. She inserted panels of flowers into broderie anglaise and invaded the lot with grommets to duplicate the holes in the lace. Sound unduly complex? It wasn't, simply because Katrantzou holds fast to her new design philosophy: Whenever it gets complicated, cut back. It's her path to the future.
25 June 2015
You learn something every day. Here's Mary Katrantzou, explaining to us the intricacies of horror vacui, fear of empty spaces (otherwise known as kenophobia), which apparently inspired the Victorians to cover every square inch of their world with stuff. Victorian maximalism vs. contemporary minimalism: Katrantzou took the face-off to the runway in her most audacious fashion statement to date. If she made her career by exalting the image, here it was all about the object, from a catwalk composed of pink foam-rubber packing material to the bath mat bodice attached to a leather skirt embossed with swirling 19th-century paisley. It was an entirely nuts proposition, a mash-up of times and textures that made little logical sense but created pieces of such provocative visual impact that resistance was impossible.From the moment when Jamie Bochert shuffled onto the catwalk in a molded tank top and a gray knit hobble skirt, Belle Époque writ now, the die was cast for a show that unfolded as a challenge to conventions of contemporary dress and taste. Plastic and fur, hard-edge and plush, brocade and bathing-cap rubber…how did they sit together so uncomfortably but so appealingly? It's that deeply inexplicable alchemy that Miuccia Prada has manipulated to such great effect for the past few decades.Katrantzou looked to the guys who make cars for help in melding technologies—or rather, molding technologies. That's where all those pieces that shaped the body came from. The synthetics of modernism combined with damasks, brocades, paisleys to create manifold weirdnesses, like the filaments of plastic that added a 3-D depth to damask, or the inserts of foam that were sliced into the waistband of a skirt. Dry cleaners around the world will be tearing out their hair. But Katrantzou has lived to challenge the ordinary from the moment she appeared on the global fashion stage. There will be plenty of people who wonder why she lined a parka hood with glass filaments that look positively lethal, or why there were things here that looked like the detritus of a toxic dump. Those people maybe don't understand how this woman has pushed the envelope from her very first appearance on the international stage. But hers is not a vision designed for comfort. The theme fromHalloweenthrobbed ominously while her models walked. Killer sound, killer looks.
22 February 2015
Mary Katrantzou's first Pre-Fall collection marked a change of approach. "It needs to straddle high summer and winter," she explained, "so there's no theme." But theme-free pragmatism scarcely took away from the technical intensity of the 30 looks. Though Katrantzou may have decided there wouldn't be a story, she opted for a unifying subtext, which she referred to as tessellation, a fancy way to talk about the classic repeated patterns in fashion: houndstooth, paisley, tartan, check. Houndstooth, for example, was exploded and embroidered with a 3-D texture, a little like terrycloth, for the most graphic pieces.In one way or another, the patterns shaped not just the style but also the substance of the clothes. For instance, complicated seaming followed the swoops and curves of paisley, even when the silhouettes themselves were pretty straightforward. "There's a lot more work on seams in this collection," said Katrantzou. "Construction is more important, because we sell structured dresses so well."Indeed, the way fabrics were treated meant some were so substantial they could almost stand on their own, like a coated jacquard that was reversed for a raffia-like feel, or the shiny lacquered finish on otherwise simple shapes. There was something Japanese about such an effect, like maybe the lacquer would crackle. Katrantzou promised not.Concealed in the patterns were references to Katrantzou's past—keys, clocks, vines, postage stamps, all echoing the themes of older collections. They were a nice touch as a tiny reminder of recent glories. Reassuring, too, in a way, because if there was a literal polish here thanks to all the shininess, there was also some personality missing. Perhaps that's the price of Pre-Fall pragmatism.
19 January 2015
Imagine being inside Mary Katrantzou's head when she's dreaming about a new collection. Dance was on her mind for Spring, but all that synchronized movement got her thinking about the body as a set of interlocking tectonic plates. Andthatgot her thinking about the planet 200 million years ago—the supercontinent Pangaea, the super-ocean Panthalassa, the way life-forms evolved from sea to land. Creationists, look away now.Katrantzou has already proved herself fearless: no ocean too deep, no mountain too high to provide grist for her creative mill. But Paleozoic planet Earth took the cake. She's moved on from the sumptuous engineered prints that made her name. Now it's sumptuous textures that captivate Katrantzou, and where better to find such things than the world in primordial flux. On a catwalk that was a lava flow of black rubber chips, with Sigur Rós soaring heavenward on the soundtrack, she paraded clothes in a palette of sand and ocean (muted, new for her), shades of alien flora and fauna, tulle printed and embroidered like a serpent's skin, plain cotton transmogrified by ridges of coral squiggles, and tectonic plates of glitter mounted peekaboo on sheer bodies. It was another Katrantzou tour de force.And it was stronger for the fact that she contextualized her technical feats with straightforward, even strict silhouettes: slipdresses, shirtdresses, shifts, sheaths, shell tops. Katrantzou claimed she would never have had the confidence to do this once upon a time. But how effective was the simple lace slip transformed by slithering synapses of embroidery. Or the beauty of a sheath dress that was an ocean of caviar beading, eerie sea creatures wriggling through it, antediluvian ooze leaking across the model's shoulder. The sophistication of the execution was an even match for the sophistication of the concept.Katrantzou's Resort collection—the alphabet—was so completely, perfectly realized that it begged the question why she simply wouldn't march that down the runway for Spring. But she was, of course, already working on this one, as she is even now prepping her next. It's almost surreal that she is capable of producing such distinct, accomplished bodies of work with such regularity. No ocean too deep, no mountain too high…
14 September 2014
When Mary Katrantzou mentionedFantasiaand the colors of Disney movies in relation to her Resort collection, something clicked. The wondrous intensity of the world she has created with her designs is akin to a complex piece of animation, maybe even more so for Resort, where Victorian picture books and candy-colored fairy tales were among the inspirations. The most elaborately embroidered creation Katrantzou has ever conceived told the story of Swan Village, with a river winding through a landscape dotted with clocks, violins, a whale, a drum kit…all of it mounted on organza and attached to a crepe back, because—never forget—Katrantzou was makingdresseshere.Last season, Katrantzou's collection was inspired by symbols and signs, tokens of nonverbal communication. The once-upon-a-time nature of Swan Village signposted Resort's new direction—storytelling through words and everything to do with them: letters, calligraphy, fonts, typography. The in-house design team's source material ranged from the medieval Book of Kells to Art Deco Maxfield Parrish to graphic design legend Milton Glaser, with letters used every which way, from jacquarded to embossed to glitter-flocked onto chiffon. Glitter was, in fact, sprinkled liberally over the entire collection, like Tinker Bell's stardust. Katrantzou couldn't get enough of the glitter tulle she found in the archives of the company that supplied her with the sparkly stuff.So graphic was the content that it demanded simplicity from the style. Katrantzou thought short was the most suitable silhouette, especially flaring little bloomers. The shapes of the letters themselves also played a part: S-bend, V-neck, an A-shaped halter, its crossbar formed by a belt. And one of the season's smartest brand extensions was the set of four handbags, spelling M, A, R, and Y.Katrantzou's mastery of her craft is now so complete that each collection is more enthralling than the one before. Which, considering that it was a _pre-_collection, not designed to be exhibited on a catwalk, made Resort even more impressive. At one point, she did consider showing it as her main line for Spring, but figured it was visually too close to Fall. Besides, she already had something else in the pipeline for September. And that's what we call luxury of choice.
20 June 2014
A Mary Katrantzou show without one single piece of eye-popping digital print? Has the world gonemad? No, not at all. If anything, Katrantzou's show tonight was an utterly rational assertion of her need to change and grow. She claimed she wanted more time to flex her creativity, to work with laces, jacquards, and brocades, rather than constantly being subject to the time-consuming tyranny of the prints that made her a star. A calculated risk, perhaps, except that Katrantzou latched onto a visual language that was just as powerful as the serial symmetry of her prints: the power of signs and symbols.Her interpretation of symbols embraced the idea of the "professional" signifier—school and sports uniforms, scouts and their badges, businessmen's pinstripes… and the purest flight of fancy, a butcher's metal apron turned into a mesmerizing bias-cut serpent's skin, trapping a torrent of pleats. But it was when she applied herself to the most primal power of symbols that Katrantzou's collection showed its truest colors. She collaged the high (heraldic emblems) and low (men's-room signs) into dense, eye-teasing swaths of fabric, and she allowed them to breathe by cutting them into the most straightforward, sporty silhouettes: a tank dress, a gym slip, a sweatshirt. If the chaos of her raw material was still ordered by the discipline of symmetry, Katrantzou managed to create embroidery-encrusted mirror images that had the barbaric opulence of totems from some recently discovered fashion cargo cult. And therewasactually something distinctly high priestess-y about her floor-sweeping pieces.But perhaps that was due to the presence fore and aft in the show of Kirsten Owen. Owen is the only possible rival to Kate Moss in terms of relevant longevity in her profession, and any designer who employs her clearly has something other than the moment of this particular season in mind. Katrantzou's collections have often taken the long view, functioning as distillations of memories, souvenirs of life to be savored and treasured. That notion was stronger than ever today. It was a beautiful new chapter for a designer who is fearless in her fusion of fashion and philosophy.
15 February 2014
You could while away the minutes till Mary's show started today by playing Count the Katrantzou in her audience: All ages, all shapes, all sizes were wearing clothes from past collections. That spells success, but it also highlighted the challenge Mary Katrantzou faces with each new season. The niche she has carved for herself narrows as the novelty of her extraordinary work with prints fades. It's a terrible truth in fashion that the gasp of wonder is inevitably replaced by the shrug of familiarity. There were plenty of those as the audience streamed out today, which was a shame because Katrantzou had, on the whole, done herself proud with a collection based on…ahem…shoes. Well, theyarefashion's favorite fetish, and as the show notes pointed out, they've always been a fairy-tale favorite, too—glass slippers, red shoes, tokens of magic and mystery.Katrantzou offered shoes three ways: the laces, eyelets, and perforations of polished brogues blown up to make lush abstracts; the high-tech artifice of sport shoes molding the body instead of the foot; the sugary embellishment of a delicate evening slipper spun into rococo fantasias. The placement of the prints was, as usual, immaculate. The way huge shoelaces curved around a thigh, for instance, or the rubberized sole of a sneaker arched around a torso had an erotic charge. The shapes Katrantzou chose to highlight these effects were perfectly appropriate, too. One innovation was a pliant micro-pleated cocoon suspended from a strap across the chest—an item packed with high-performance bounce.So far, so focused. But then came the evening looks: baby dolls exaggerated with ruffles, florals exaggerated with embroidery, everything choking on decoration. Katrantzou has been working with the legendary Maison Lesage in Paris. It's clearly an opportunity that has thrilled her to the bone, but it's maybe been too much of a good thing. There was even something slightly sinister about the overwrought edge. Perhaps that was her deliberate nod to the eldritch power of the shoe, the receptacle of so much human desire, elevatedandbase. Because it was clear from the Katrantzou-clad clan today that desire is something Mary knows what to do with.
14 September 2013
Back in the day, dreaming up a dress with 25 distinct references, Mary Katrantzou compared herself to an interior designer. In her new Resort collection, there are maybe five references per outfit. "It's nowhere near as complex," she said the other day. "Now I'm not designing interiors. I'm more a landscape artist."This is the first time Katrantzou has created a Resort collection. Some designers use Resort to anticipate; others, to consolidate. The latter is the route she took, using her Fall collection as a launchpad. Hence, the landscape art. But if Fall's landscapes were melancholy monochrome, Resort's were the intense tones of flowers, just as if the sun had come out. In fact, to walk into Katrantzou's new showroom space lined with color-coded racks felt a little like walking into a giant, gorgeous greenhouse, with roses climbing up trellises, and a wildflower meadow, and tree branches lacing themselves together over ornamental ponds, and, looming over everything, an enormous industrial framework keeping the world at bay. Rather sci-fi, in fact—which might explain why Katrantzou's most haunting print was an impossible vision that melted together a post-nuclear desert, a mirror-still lagoon on which a Japanese fisherman floated (with a dragon on his shoulder!), and a slab of cantilevered modernist architecture. And please do remember this is a dress we're talking about—although the same print did reoccur in sweatshirts in raffia or sheer mesh.Given such extravagant visuals, the designer was best off providing the most straightforward screen, which, for the most part, Katrantzou did. The indulgences she allowed herself worked more often than not. The biker jacket whose print mirrored that on the dress underneath, for instance. Or the strapless silk dress veiled in an organza printed with the same landscape, one a beautifully spectral echo of the other. Katrantzou claimed she has moved on from a quest for perfection to something more emotional, and it was all there.
18 June 2013
Cristobal Balenciaga would create one single black dress each season to highlight his latest innovations in cut. He felt monochrome honed the eye to understand and appreciate his technique. A similar thought process motivated Mary Katrantzou with her new collection. Wanting, she said, to take her work forward, she shifted away from the prints and color palette that have fueled her meteoric rise, to a strong focus on shape and silhouette. Which meant that color was almost completely back-seated this season.As much as the audacity of that move might have been cause for concern, it also generated anticipation, especially when Katrantzou mentioned the early-twentieth-century photogravures of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz as guiding lights. Their painterly, impressionistic black and white photos reengineered nature as effectively as Katrantzou has done in her own work. Today, an early outfit—printed with tram-lined cobblestones, a single streetlamp, misty moonlight—suggested monochrome could be just as magical as last season's banknote beauties. So did the image of a blossom-laden tree that spread across one sleeve of a top while, on the other sleeve, a full moon hung suspended in the sky. Color or no, Katrantzou's fantastical, shadowy landscapes still seduced, with the added poignant allure of the melancholy that inevitably attaches itself to misty monochrome.But this time, those remarkable prints weren't the main event—and that's where the trouble started. In her yen for progress, Katrantzou opted for the architecture of asymmetry, with huge obilike folds and (for the first time) drapes of fabric that suggested Japan's—or McQueen's—fashion avant-garderie. Stiff asymmetrical excrescences sprouted like breastplates. (One of them acted as a screen for a cascading waterfall.) Though you could say that contrivance has always been at the heart of Katrantzou's work, that wouldn't have implied criticism until today. The statement she wished to make was obvious, made more dramatic by the hardness of embossed black leather, in an austere shift or a skirt under a big slashed sweater. They were direct—maybe even violent—enough to make you wonder if Katrantzou felt that color has become a prison for her. She did, however, leave the door open a crack, with a handful of prints that looked hand-tinted, like turn-of-the-century postcards.
16 February 2013
There was once a certain kind of child who would collect stamps, or gather the money that relatives brought back from foreign travel, and dream about what each piece of paper represented, where it might have been, who had touched it on its journey round the world. For that child, a stamp, a banknote were small passports to an exotic otherness. Or maybe they were instruments connecting cultures. That's how Mary Katrantzou thought of them. She loved the stories they told. As borders changed and currencies became obsolete, stamps and banknotes lingered as tokens of the past, literal souvenirs of the values of other, lost cultures.All the romance, melancholy, and beauty of those ideas were swept up in Katrantzou's latest collection, an absolute fashion tour de force. She's already proved she can make a ravishing print out of almost anything, and she has applied those prints to some extraordinary silhouettes, but form and content blended so effortlessly today that this felt like the point she'd been aspiring to since she started. It helped that stamps and banknotes have an innate two-dimensional symmetry that loans itself to abstraction in accessible shapes. And Katrantzou's shapes today were noticeably direct: A-lines, shirtdresses, shifts, and sheaths, offering ideal canvases. A stamp's serrated edges, for instance, provided a striking geometric border down the leg of slimline trousers. And the whorls and spirals of a banknote provided a luxurious pattern for a pantsuit in midnight blue brocade, especially when shot through with darkly sparkling Lurex.That particularly stunning outfit crystallized just how refined Katrantzou's eye has become at abstracting pure form from her inspirations. But she has also mastered her materials to a quite ingenious degree. The finale featured one-of-a-kind pieces that paired metallic brocades and Swarovski crystal mesh printed with banknote designs. The process was almost impossibly complex, but the result was pure poetry, suggesting the golden shimmer of Byzantium. At the other end of the scale, Katrantzou worked with denim for the first time. Those pieces came at the beginning of the show. Suffice it to say they were scarcely denim as we know and recognize it.Alex Fury's show notes referred to "the pure cultural capital" generated by Katrantzou's alchemical transformation of her subject matter. The soundtrack made the point a little more straightforwardly when, at one point, cash registers rang out.
How often will this collection be defined in the next while by one word:ker-ching?
15 September 2012
Mary Katrantzou's thank-yous today included a shout-out to Antony Price, the British fashion legend whose claims to fame included dressing Roxy Music and their cover girls. Price was a specialist in the dramatic silhouette, and Katrantzou had clearly been doing her homework, because she recaptured that drama. "I'd already done the peplum and hourglass," she said backstage. "So I was looking for different silhouettes to emphasize embroidery and embellishments." And, Katrantzou scarcely needed to add, to frame those extraordinary prints that have propelled her lickety-split to the top of the London fashion class. Hence a godet skirt, so difficult to engineer print-wise that she made only four of them. Or frothing torrents of chiffon. Or a strictly corseted shape she'd extracted from some historical research (specifically Elizabethan England) without, she was quick to add, "crossing into the territory of costume."Katrantzou also extended her repertoire in other ways. For the first time, she focused on a single color top-to-toe, like the crayons on her invitation. And she'd chosen deliberately banal subject matter to match the colors. Green meant grass, for instance, rendered as an ornamental lawn working its way down a floor-length gown. Yellow was expressed in a mandala of No. 2 HB pencils, erasers attached. They were rendered in rubber by the Lesage embroidery atelier in Paris—not only the first time Lesage's artisans had worked with such stuff, but also their first collaboration with a London designer. Clocks, hedges, telephones, spoons, and forks also provided source material. The bodice of a rococo red velvet dress featured a red typewriter, its keys providing a coiling abstract geometry on the skirt.The serial patterning was so intense at times that it made you feel like the one person who couldn't make out the 3-D image in those Magic Eye pictures that were a minor craze a few years back. As everyone else shouted, one after another, "Oh, yes, I see it now," you'd be chewing on your eyeliner in a blind rage. But Katrantzou's conceits were so beautifully conceptualized—here never more so than with the bathtub that foamed with crystals and pearls—that her elevation of the quotidian to the sublime was, once again, easily one of the finest pieces of theater in London fashion week.
20 February 2012
How could Mary Katrantzou possibly sustain the mind-blowing fusion of style and substance that made her first collections so intoxicating? The boldness is still there—she built her latest collection around the biggest issue of our age: man vs. nature—but today she soft-pedaled the jaw-droppingly detailed artifice of her earlier shows in favor of broader, more abstract strokes. Still, there's no denying the results were more accessible. Instead of rigid, formal architecture, there were sensuous human forms sheathed in knit or trailing diaphanous chiffon.The all-important prints hinted at nature exploded—scales, feathers, flowers blown up to an unrecognizable degree—and the manmade imploded. Katrantzou had been looking at the crushed-car sculptures of John Chamberlain, so there was a metallic sheen to the collection, achieved in part by making some pieces out of tulle bonded to Mylar, but also with prints made up of metal objects like cans and car parts. Katrantzou extended the conceit into actual 3-D metal, with little paint cans blackened, crystallized, and crusted onto a dress like an alien appliqué swirled diagonally with bands of colored metal flowers. "A whirlwind of metal," she called it.Katrantzou's work is chockablock with ideas. Here, for instance, she drew parallels between the serial repetition you find in nature—in the serried order of a flower field, for instance—and the industrial mass production of our society. It's a depth of thought you'd expect to find in art, but it's rare in fashion. And when the ideas and execution meld, Katrantzou has proved herself a remarkable new voice. Here, however, there was a slightly discombobulating distance between the two, almost as though the abstract was too abstract, the literal too literal. But Katrantzou's teasing trompe l'oeil—as in the elaborate metal obi that looked like Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim—is still one of fashion's marvels.
19 September 2011
Last season, Mary Katrantzou's tour de force of interior-exterior decoration put "the room on the woman." So she said. This collection was more about "the woman in the room." Stated the designer backstage today, "It's more fluid, more real." But the "more fluid" her "more real" got, the more you were left in the same jaw-dropped state of irreality that her Spring show had induced. That was mostly because Katrantzou imagined the woman as a connoisseur, surrounded by objects of beauty like Fabergé eggs, Meissen porcelain, cloisonné enamel, and Ming vases. And all of them were reproduced in hyper-vivid prints. The koi in one print were all but swimming before your eyes.To match the luxurious collectibles that inspired these prints, Katrantzou borrowed silhouettes from the haute couture wardrobes of their imagined owners. (The names of legendary style icons like Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley, and the Duchess of Windsor were bandied around, though there was a bucket skirt shape that could have been in Armani's last Couture collection.) But, to be honest, the artificiality of these shapes scarcely felt like a remove from Spring's lamp shades.Anyway, it's a no-brainer that a flat, wide pannier or peplum makes a perfect screen for Katrantzou's projections. Things got more interesting when the designer softened her silhouette. "It's hellishly difficult to put a placement print on a bias-cut dress," she sighed backstage. Even to those of us uninitiated in the art of printmaking, the challenge presents itself as something like nailing water to the floor. Remarkably, the designer mastered the bias, and a whole lot of other soft options besides, from a Lurex-shot Orientalist knit sheath to daisy-strewn panne velvet to a billowing purple infanta gown.The softness was a plus for any woman who would rather wear her Katrantzou than hang it on the wall. But one day, it will belong there too, on the wall of a museum, in an exhibition dedicated to the absorbing aesthetic excess of our era. "I want to push print to the limit," said Katrantzou, at the same time as she encouraged us to think there mightn't be one.
21 February 2011
For her first stand-alone show, Mary Katrantzou came up with a conceit so dazzling, so artful, but so elementary that it made you wonder why no one else had attempted it. She'd been looking at the highly stylized seventies photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin when it occurred to her that the interiors in the pictures were just as important as the models. "With this collection, I wanted to put the room on the woman, rather than the woman in the room," Katrantzou said after the show. You could say Hussein Chalayan attempted something similar ten years ago, but his pieces were elements of a conceptual performance, while Katrantzou's were desirable clothes to be worn. The fact that they were also surreal masterpieces of the digital printer's craft only made them more seductive.Katrantzou said she worked in three dimensions for the first time while designing her prints, and there was an almost hallucinatory depth to the images she lifted from old issues ofArchitectural DigestandWorld of Interiors, once they were laid over her precisely fitted silhouettes. One memorable example: a dress whose top half featured a swimming pool in an L.A. house, while below was a view of the city by night from a balcony that, one imagined, was part of the same dwelling. Another: a polished dining-table cut away as a skirt, with a perspective of the room behind rising up the bodice. But these descriptions can scarcely convey the exquisite symmetry of the printing that, at various points within the collection, created patterns it was almost possible to read as abstract art.It didn't stop there. Katrantzou added trompe l'oeil interior details to the clothes. A pelmet created a portrait neckline above a print of a window frame; swaths of chiffon fluttered like curtains; mini-crinis echoed lampshades with dangling pendants of crystal. Wall sconces were reconfigured as necklaces (but they were too literally heavy for the airiness of the clothes they accompanied). After the show, Italian style icon Anna Dello Russo was in raptures. Nowthere'sa woman who'll be wearing a room in Milan next week.
18 September 2010
Portraits of Madame de Pompadour, the paintings of Fragonard and Nattier—what could the frills and curlicues of the rococo have to do with the digital print revolution? "Yes, it's excessive, and decorative, and I know everyone else is talking about minimalism," shrugged Mary Katrantzou, backstage after her show. "But I knew I needed to go a little outside the stuff I've been doing. And I do like a challenge."She was referring to the need to feel her way into new silhouettes as well as to find some way of breaking out of the kaleidoscopic swirls and sharp-angled geometric explosions that have characterized the sensational prints coming out of London in the last two or three years. Katrantzou, a print and textile expert, has been at the forefront of inventing a new visual language that has stunned fashion with its novelty—a language Alexander McQueen was also using fluently in his last two shows. Her problem, rightly anticipated, is that novelty quickly becomes cliché—and a cheap T-shirt dress on a market stall. To keep things interesting, Katrantzou knows she has to do something more sophisticated than a placement print on a shift dress.This time, she merged photographic images of lace, jewels, ormolu, medals, and sashes in ways that vaguely recalled Gianni Versace's more-is-more scarf prints, and she sculpted some of them into shapes that echoed parts of military jackets. Printed vest-jackets, a couple of Napoleonic coats, and a frothy frill-front shirt added bandwidth to her offer, too. Still, the effects, though interesting, seemed slightly stiff and forced until Katrantzou let herself go at the end, sending out a couple of dresses that combined asymmetric bodices, lace patched against print, glints of metallic, and cascades of half-trains trailing off at the side. Somehow, they succeeded in hitting a note of oddness that seemed new.
19 February 2010
Mary Katrantzou is among the second wave of breakout stars of the digital print revolution that has been sweeping London's designers since Basso & Brooke began experimenting a few years ago. The shift from mechanical screen printing to computer manipulations of color and pattern has meant designers like Katrantzou can achieve hitherto impossibly complex feats of imagination, and she's moving as fast as pixels and ink jets can be pushed to decorate a beautiful silk dress.For Spring, the wavy, multicolored trompe l'oeil patterns were an intensification of the research into perfume bottles Katrantzou used last Fall. This time, she'd gotten sucked into the visual possibilities of the spiraling, fluid forms of artisanal blown glass. "It became more free-form, and kind of organic," she said of her collection. "We ended up naming some of the dresses Sea Tiger, Barracuda, and Yellow Inferno." To complete the theme, she asked a British master of art glass-blowing, Peter Layton, to make neckpieces and cuffs, and added gold Swarovski beading to a bodice section that "took six people three days to finish."The result: far more sophisticated pieces than the front-only placement prints on shifts she did last season. It was a definite step forward for a Greek-born designer whose focus can be credited to the best creative education: Rhode Island School of Design, Central Saint Martins MA, and London's Centre for Fashion Enterprise, where she's now the recipient of free studio space and business mentorship.
18 September 2009
For her debut runway collection, Mary Katrantzou jolted her audience—a packed house, at 9 a.m.—wide awake. As the recipient of New Generation funding, she used every resource to pull together an impressive development of the bold placement prints and jewelry she spent last season showing to buyers, gathering orders. Her motifs—simplified images of perfume bottles—packed a clean, colorful graphic punch and polish that belied the effort they had taken to assemble. "I found a printer called the Silk Bureau here in London," she laughed. "They do it in their garage."Last season, Katrantzou's first offerings were all in a single shift shape. Their newness and wearability won plenty of takers on sight, but some were left wondering whether, as a textile specialist, she'd be able to broaden her line into different silhouettes. Katrantzou delivered impressively, adding fluted skirts and new dress shapes, long-line tubes, and zippered suede pants. Better still, she raised the level of her other talent as a jewelry designer, layering on giant necklaces constructed from gold tubing, chains, and mirrors. Again, it was a question of a determined young woman using every resource at her disposal, including the help of her family in Athens. As Katrantzou explained backstage, "My mother has a furniture-making factory. She's retired, but I forced her to get back in there and make me some pieces." It may be about the toughest time to launch a business, but this is a young talent whose vision and attitude are, by every indication, just about perfectly adapted to make things happen for herself.
23 February 2009