September 22, 2016 |
Do you know the song La Vie Boheme from the musical Rent? No? Not a gay man born in the mid-eighties? Well this, Peter Dundas’s SS17 collection for Roberto Cavalli, was like that. Well, except it wasn’t about New York, or heroine, strippers or casual sex, but it was about bohemians. The bohemian life. Bohemians that travel. Ladies who trot around the globe wearing a fabulous costume box of clothes. Or, as the release said, “the wanderlust of the pagan traveller, a melange of inspirations and influences, times and places, she wears her world, combining different cultures in a way that feels quintessentially new and uniquely Cavalli.” So what did this mean when it came down to the clothes? Embellished denim, swishy layered dresses, floating gypsy skirts. Spaghetti Western-studs, a nice line in big-framed Seventies sunglasses. But it was patchworking that was at the heart of this collection, both in the thrilling mish-mash of references and in the fabric itself – Navajo and Apache prints next to those that inspired by the tailoring of Nudie Cohn, Egyptian patterns clashing with the clothing of Victorian pioneers. And somewhere amongst that, as Dundas said, an ode to Elvis, the singer’s silhouette lending the collection a very Cavalli rock and roll tinge. Ultimately, this was a collection with the power to transport, to far off places, and far away from the Milanese salon it was presented in. And what more could you want from a collection than that? Because really, where would anyone want to go but away?
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
