New York – Dresses of mermaids or all in scales, and sounds of the ocean: on the third day Sunday of New York Fashion Week, Altuzarra plunged into the underwater depths and revisited the myth of the adventurers of the seas.
A heavy copy of Moby Dick, wrapped in a knotted cloth, awaited each guest in the sumptuous decor of the ground floor of the Woolworth Building, the neo-Gothic building which was, a very long time ago, with its 241 meters, the skyscraper highest sky in the world. It is also quite simply in this emblematic building in southern Manhattan, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, that the ready-to-wear brand has its premises.
Between the marble work, the gilding and under the high vaulted ceilings filled with mosaics, the Franco-American creator Joseph Altuzarra has imagined a mysterious and somewhat dark world, to the sound of Façades, one of the pieces by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass which walked through the parade. Collars turned up, as if to protect themselves from the wind, sailor sweater, baskets worn on the shoulder, mother-of-pearl closures, everything was turned towards the sea and the path led the models towards the four ends of the great hall, like the cardinal points of a compass.
To escape
On the pleated dresses, geometric shapes drawn by hand, were to recall seashells. Other dresses, very close to the body, gave the shapes of mermaids to those who wore them. Joseph Altuzarra likes to work on ornaments, like the pompom threads that run through his collections. On Sunday, he could have a field day. On knits, appear “coin-shaped embellishments cut from aluminum and tarnished by hand for an aged and hydrolyzed appearance”, underlines the collection note. The famous model Gigi Hadid closed the parade in a long dress made of these golden medals, like so many scales which reconstituted marine sounds.
“During this whole period, we have not been able to travel much, nor to escape. I escaped a lot in books and stories. It was a bit of a tribute to all that,” explained Joseph Altuzarra. A few years ago, for another parade, he was inspired by the world of the animated film “Princess Mononoke” by Hayao Miyazaki, a fable about deforestation in medieval Japan.
“It was a very romantic, very personal collection,” summed up the designer on Sunday, returning to parade in New York since the last edition of Fashion Week, in September, after a getaway of several seasons in Paris. New York Fashion Week “Fall Winter 2022” continues through Wednesday. (AFP)
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