To start it all off, what better way to begin then by showing you the first collection to kick off the whole fashion week.
ROMANCE WAS BORN
Images sourced from Vogue
Anna Plunkett is a Thor girl, Luke Sales a Hulk man, and the dynamic
duo behind Romance Was Born have always wanted to create a collection based on
their favourite comics.
They couldn’t
have picked a better moment, with The Avengers grossing $178 million on
its global debut last week, and Thor, the Hulk et al. on target to decimate
Harry Potter’s numbers when they descend on the US box office this weekend.
It’s sheer coincidence that the world went Marvel-mad just as Plunkett and
Sales unveiled their latest looks – after all, decades of designers from
Thierry Mugler to Jeremy Scott have been dedicated followers of superheroism –
but a front row of Marvel executives did help to elevate today’s outing to
something more… zeitgeist-y. Not in a Chris Nolan revisionist-dystopian way,
mind, but in the shiny, happy spirit of SHAZAM! that made TV’s Batman
such guilt-free bliss. Pure pop, in other words. High fashion for a 1-D world.
It was all
there in the capelet and skirt in matching paillettes, the op-art bodysuiting,
the sparkly peplum silhouettes, the candy/cartoon colours, the make-up and hair
(Plunkett called it Annie Orange, after their idol Annie Lennox). But there was
also the simplicity of a white cotton shirt dress printed with a bulging torso,
as well as a sinister insectoid edge that echoed the mutant element of
superheroism: the wings of a cicada referenced in fine gold netting, a beetle’s
wings evoked by the glossy black folds of a skirt.
It was that kind of
throw-away effect that kept the collection from kitsch literalism. Plus,
Plunkett and Sales were clever not to directly quote their sources (or at
least, when they got too close, they’d twist them – the Hulk’s face was
fuchsia). Still, a Romance Was Born production is never going to be an exercise
in subtlety. You could imagine the Marvel execs coming away impressed by the
special effects. At the same time, you could wonder what would happen if the
designers tempered the excess, applied all that florid, fantastic technique to
the creation of something more straightforward. Discipline a superpower, and
you'll usually get more from less.
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