Couture week spring 2022: let’s take refuge in space

High fashion has always been something that went hand in hand with the concept of unattainable and dream. That part that you can only dream of, unless you are in a very narrow range of customers. At the moment, the ongoing pandemic makes haute couture even more distant due to the fact that many customers cannot “touch” the product at the end of the show. More generally, the era we are living in makes us even more often desire escape, mental and physical, and this couture week is a clear manifestation of this.

Space, the physical interstellar one or the one imagined after death, becomes an escape and refuge for designers and their clothes. And so the dream idea is complete.

SCHIAPARELLI

With Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Schiaparelli, high fashion often becomes linked to something otherworldly in a religious sense. And here, with the stars as a side dish, the result is guaranteed. The cuts of the 50s-style dresses, the total black dotted with white and gold and a certain aura of darkness, put the dots on the typical extravagance of the brand.

CHRISTIAN DIOR

Maria Grazia Chiuri is by no means extraneous to the general cosmos concept. We often see her models perfectly inserted in a sort of ethereal peplos that turn sometimes towards an enchanted world of fairies, sometimes towards a Hellenistic past, and here in a future worthy of the most elegant of Leia ever seen before.

FENDI

Kim Jones made his haute couture debut for Fendi, with an incredible show finally in the public presence. Rome is still a great muse, but this time Jones draws on stories like Dune and Star Wars to create her own Hollywood-style heaven on earth. Thus, the antiquity of Rome embraces futurism.

JEAN PAUL GAULTIER

The space imagined by Glenn Martens is of a completely different kind. Sensual, fierce, at times ironic, perfectly Gaultier. The attention to detail is palpable together with the incredible modeling research, as in the marinière transformed into a dress and decorated with coral tips whose realization, it seems, drove the whole team crazy until the last minute (so couture!). Fully draped semi sheer dresses are exactly what makes us fly to another planet.

VALENTINO

Pier Paolo Piccioli has made us fly beyond the imagination, not only the interstellar one but that of the real future. A future in which fashion embraces all types of sizes, ethnicities and ages. It has been a topic that has been very dear to Piccioli for some time, and he has now managed to include this new concept of fashion in haute couture as well. Couture, then, being the representation of the “custom made”, seems to be the branch of fashion that most needs to get out of the show pattern with a single body model.

all images courtesy of the brands. ON COVER from left: Fendi, Jean Paul Gaultier, Schiaparelli