Finger-detail belt by Yazbukey
Except it is: there are eyes on frocks and clothes with clocks as Surrealism seeps into fashion design
By Celina Plag
Liberate your associations, embrace idiosyncrasy, celebrate the subconscious – Surrealism returns to bridge the chasm between dream and reality. In the late 1920s Elsa Schiaparelli proved how this artistic movement could find astonishing new forms of expression when worn on the body, and, taking a leaf out of her book, this season labels like Kenzo, Prada and Yazbukey are reintroducing the Surrealists’ key emblems in contemporary looks, dealing with the elements of surprise, juxtapositions and non sequitur.
And so does an entire limited collection by Italian label MSGM who play with woozy surrealistic references: in collaboration with the audacious art magazine Toilet Paper, they brought gaudy prints on basic sweaters – a frog in a burger, men’s hands holding deep red lipsticks, a twinkling eye in an eyelash curler. They’re attention-grabbing because they seem absurd to the rational mind, yet none of them are actually empty of meaning. The Surrealists considered the flower as the ideal of beauty, an unmediated symbol of femininity, just as lipstick can be read as an erotic link to the absentee, the lips of a woman – you see what these dirty dreamers really liked to deal with. Or take the eye, another common but ambivalent symbol: an instrument for optical perception, but also an object seen from the outside, ranging thrillingly between viewing and voyeurism. No wonder it’s been picked up by other brands: Kenzo, for instance, where the eye becomes a detail on skirts and pants and an allseeing apparition on blouses and jumpers.
KENZO Fall 2013 RTW
Then there are hands: also a famous surrealistic symbol, and which Paris-based accessory label Yazbukey playfully took up. For this season, they present a belt made of Plexiglas, where red lacquered fingers serve as closure – another sexual allusion that could only be topped by the most erotic metaphor of all, Salvador Dalí’s object of desire: the lobster. There’s plenty more from the deep blue sea at Charlotte Olympia and Katie Eary.
Lips, hands, eyes, crustacea, craziness – no matter how surrealistic references in fashion appear, they can all be read as a counter-trend to the dominating state of the art: to a fashion controlled by algorithmic reason, where the cuts are functional and the edges sharp, where prints are computed and colours monochrome, where the style is futuristic and accessories are engineered. With a dose of the surreal, fashion does what it has always claimed to do: celebrate the irrational.
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