If the feature-erasing, pre-show red light was any indication, we were not about to see anything resembling a detail at Proenza Schouler's Winter fashion show. But just as the eerie red glow dimmed and the audience slowly adjusted themselves to real life with real wrinkles, every eyeball in the room got jolted yet again. This time, though, the shock was in the form of splattered patterns that began in micro speckled formations on highly structured, deeply engineered clothing and slowly grew in scale into more ambitious abstractions. As is the case in almost all of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez's brilliant work, it was hard to discern at first glance what exactly created all the commotion on the clothes. Were these patterns printed on or woven into? Were we looking at jacquards or knits? Could that jacket with the nipped waist and ballooning sleeves stand up by itself in the corner? The guessing is all part of the Proenza game and in this case, it turned out there was a healthy dose of intrigue. Much of the surface detail on the clothes - which at times looked liked abstracted animal prints (think scratchy tiger stripes or broken down giraffe tiles) - was the result of flocking, a printing technique that makes the surface of the garment raise up like a sponge. This looked especially sharp in shots of brilliant colour - like hot tomato or cool turquoise mixed with black - and when cut into sharp A-line skirts or nipped waist jackets. Alternatively, the designers used jacquards to create fancy pixelated effects on round-shouldered wool coats, or collaged square pieces of leather, knits and wools into fabrics that resembled aerial landscape shots. What they didn't do was anything home-spun or crafty looking. This was a speedy, urban collection that played with proportion as much as it did wildly unruly pattern, all to fascinating effect.
Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans
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