March 3, 2016 |
Madeleine Vionnet was one of the leading lights of pre-war Parisian haute couture. She changed the face of fashion, inventing the bias cut still beloved by celebrities for red carpet wear today. So the challenge at Vionnet is far less marked than other houses – Goga Ashkenazi’s house is embedded in the here and now, rather than the past. It already has a relevance. This season, she apparently purchased a trove of archive Vionnet ephemera, and decided to embed her collection in the house codes they evoked – precise details of outfits sometimes, other times fragments of patterns, shapes or decorative motifs. There was a sense of the sinuous twenties and thirties, the prime stomping ground of Madeleine, evoked through a timeless fluidity. It all looked as good today as it did eighty-plus years ago. No mean feat.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
