December 23, 2014 |
There’s a saying – to look to the future we must look to the past, or something like that. Anyway, it would seem that Francisco Costa has glimpsed the future by looking to the past. The silhouette at Calvin Klein is streamlined; fabrics are sleek in a palette of black, blue, white and a pale camel. Shapes have a slight 1960s feel to them. Dresses are short and unembellished, apart from a matt silver bib in some cases. Metal is very future 1960s. If you wanted to be futuristic in the 1960s you couldn’t have a dress without any metal, or at least some Perspex. Cropped jackets are zipped up, longer coats are tightly belted, skirts have a slight A-line to them, trousers – well, the two pairs of trousers – are slim and straight and end on the ankle. Pockets are closed with curved zips. This is the future. “Functional fashion.” But through what prisms of the past did Costa look to form his vision?
Youthquake
Francisco is trying to, or so we read somewhere, “capture the spirit of Youthquake in a modern way”. “The passage of time had a vibrant energy.” Youthquake, as in the term coined by Diana Vreeland in the 1960s to describe the youth movement. Youth was more vocal, more engaged, more creative and prominent than it had ever been. Youth culture exploded. It demanded to be heard. It quaked. Hence youthquake.
Matisse
Autumn was apparently very organic, says Costa. “It was time to offer women something else.” And so Costa looked to the paper cuts by Matisse. Wikipedia explains that, in 1941, Matisse underwent surgery in which a colostomy was performed. Afterwards he started using a wheelchair, and until his death he was cared for by a Russian woman, Lydia Delektorskaya, formerly one of his models. With the aid of assistants he set about creating cut-paper collages, often on a large scale, called gouaches decoupees. His Blue Nudes series feature prime examples of this technique he called “painting with scissors”; they demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power. The cutouts, we’ve once again read somewhere, have an engaging simplicity coupled with incredible creative sophistication. Something that could also be said of Costa’s cruise offerings for Calvin Klein.
By Natalie Dembinska
