September 25, 2018 |
In a parking garage in northern Paris the Vivienne westwood crew was hard at it. Gary Card, the ace set designer and his team carried on scrunching and fixing swathes of paper to the set as the models rolled around the catwalk. Rolled? The show opened with skater boys wearing loose Westwood dresses and mid-heeled mules, nonchalantly wheeling round the catwalk.
We learnt later that Andreas Kronthaler has been inspired by Jessica-Fulford Dobson’s photographs of the skateboarding girls of Kabul – a group that promotes women’s rights through skateboarding. Kabul girls inspiring dresses worn by boys – why not? Kronthaler and his team don’t think in binary when they design. There were women in the show too. They wore exploded versions of Westwood’s corseted finery, layered up and balanced atop Buffalo flatforms. Kronthaler’s twisted tea dresses were worn by women and men and the show was punctuated by three muscle bound hunks whizzing around on electric scooters modelling a new men’s underwear line of rainbow coloured budgie smugglers. It was surprising and fun – a joyful cacophony of interesting characters. How very Westwood.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans.
