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Sunday, March 23, 2014

In the Air | To Infinity and Beyond

This season, fashion looks to the heavens, taking inspiration from both space-age design and the wondrous immensity of the night sky.
Clockwise from top left: NASA; Alix Malka; Archivio Fuksas; Chanel; © Melvin Sokolsky/Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York.
The space race, which culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11’s lunar landing (top left), sparked fashion’s interest in futuristic colors and synthetic materials. Take Melvin Sokolsky’s 1963 image of a helmeted model hovering over the Seine in a giant plastic orb (bottom left). The designer Hussein Chalayan unveiled a similarly bubble-heavy look (top right) in 2006, while Chanel’s spring couture collection (center) delivered shiny retro-futuristic dresses with bejeweled sneakers, all of which would fit right in at Terminal 3 of China’s Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport (bottom right), designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas.
Clockwise from bottom left: Carlton Hobbs LLC; Pomellato; Courtesy of Dior; António Cidadão.
At this spring’s Christian Dior haute couture show, a translucent skirt resembled a series of half-lit moons (center), while the black diamonds that cover Pomellato’s Sabbia ring conjure images of a lunar surface embedded with craters (top left). Although it’s impossible to ever see the texture of the moon’s landscape when it’s fully illuminated (right), the German scientific photographer Julius Grimm achieved that very effect in his 1888 painting “Mond” (bottom left).
Clockwise from top left: TheaterMuseum, Vienna; Schiaparelli; Guy Marineau/Condé Nast Archive/Corbis; Wenn; Chanel.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to celestial-inspired fashion. The Greek deity Artemis is often depicted with a crescent-moon crown, and in 1816, a production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” showed its star-covered Queen of the Night suspended from a heavenly set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (top left). The designer and muse Loulou de la Falaise later adapted the look at her wedding party in 1977 (right), as did Catherine Deneuve’s character in Jacques Demy’s film “Donkey Skin” (center left). Nothing, however, reflects the majesty of a shining star like jewels, such as the diamonds in Chanel Fine Jewelry’s Comète collection (bottom left) and the rhinestone headpiece worn this spring at Schiaparelli couture (center right).
Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Blago Fund, Inc. USA; Christie’s Images Limited; © The British Library Board (X432/5 (19)); Dbachmann.
Ancient civilizations worshiped the sky while later cultures tried to make sense of the stars (top left). The great Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi, India (bottom right), was constructed in 1724 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, who believed that the instruments of that era were too small to precisely measure time or track the positions of the stars. The earliest such tool that we know of, a Bronze Age Nebra sky disc (bottom left), was discovered in Germany in 1999, and calls to mind Line Vautrin’s moonlike mirror from 1965 (top right).
From left: “I Want! I Want!” Plate 9, “For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise,” Part of the Reissue C.1818, William Blake/© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, U.K.; Mark Holm for the New York Times; Versace.
Visionaries have long been fascinated by the exploration and escape inherent in the cosmos. Bringing the fantasy of space travel back down to earth, this season Versace couture showed a fully embroidered evening dress straight out of a science-fiction film (right). Less tangible but altogether more real are flights leaving from Virgin Galactic’s $209 million Spaceport America terminal in New Mexico (center) later this year — something that the English poet William Blake could never have predicted when he created his 1793 engraving “I Want! I Want!” (left).

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