Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren went down memory lane for today’s couture collection. Twenty-six year ago, their second couture collection’s silhouettes were based on the mushroom-cloud shape of an atomic bomb explosion. The models wore huge pillows around their neck. Shapes were “very graphic and exaggerated and absurd,” they said at a preview for this collection. “So this came to mind again for this season, after twenty-six years. We liked the idea of doing something absurd, that makes no sense. We wanted to take this concept further. On the one hand, the human body; on the other hand, the most abstract shapes. Couture as an exaggeration on abstract-ism.” The Dutch designers are masters in this field.
Like kids playing with building blocks, they crafted garments based on geometric shapes, coming up with rectangular, triangular, spherical or trapezoid volumes. A dress encased the body in a box of fuchsia fabric (a bit like a bizarre soft coffin); the humongous shoulders of a miniskirt-suit’s jacket were suspended from a razor-shaped trapezoid; a multicolored short satin coat was assembled like a heap of 3D squares and rectangles; a pussy-bowed pleated shirt shaped like a huge balloon seemed to explode out of an off-the shoulder, cinched-waisted, double-breasted blazer in black-and-white cotton Vichy.
The whole thing had a sort of virtuosic absurdity to it—something between Euclidean geometry seen through the eyes of a slightly dysfunctional gifted kid and the constructivist Bauhaus marionettes of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. “Couture for us is a lab of experiments and inventions,” said V & R. They weren’t keen to elaborate much on the “why?”, and “what for?” or “who’s gonna wear it?” They just praised abstraction, which gives freedom of interpretation: “The viewer can let his mind wonder, make free associations. We like that. We offer something that is a starting point for someone’s own train of thought,” they said. The soundtrack was the epitome of abstraction too—a human voice pronouncing just incomprehensible syllables. You were thinking the voice was saying something, but it didn’t. Was it a metaphor for the absurd, nonsensical blabbering we’re surrounded by? Some sort of critique? The enigmatic Viktor & Rolf kept mum: “The meaning? We can construct it ourselves.”
