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Mary Katrantzou - Ready to Wear - Fall Winter 2012 - London

21 Feb 2012
Ready To Wear Fall Winter 2012 London

Katrantzou, a Central Saint Martins print graduate and winner of the Emerging Talent Awards at last year’s British Fashion Awards, is quickly gaining a well deserved reputation as the queen of digital prints. 

 Although she isn’t single-handedly responsible for the fact that we all love wearing prints from head to toe these days, she very well could be – her abundant imagery of everyday banalities are always inventive as she brings to life on the catwalk things such as a bathtub appeared on an Elizabethan-inspired, high-necked silk top with its foam bubbles made of encrusted pearls to add dimension. Teaspoons made up the repeat print on a peplum dress while an old-fashioned rotary telephone dial print decorated a stiff silk cape. Silk trousers completed the look. 

This collection, as Katrantzou said, was about "celebrating the beauty in the everyday" and "elevating the mundane to the sublime". She smothered her signature structured lampshade-shaped dresses and stiff A-line tailored coats with spoons, phone dials, typewriter keys, luggage tassels and hangers – one dress was even embroidered with hundreds of real yellow pencils. The embroidery in question was executed by Lesage marking the first time the French haute couture house has worked with a London Fashion week designer.

The prints and embellishments were brilliantly entertaining, inventive as ever – but the construction in this collection was just as much of the story: Victorian bustled dresses, strict Elizabethan corsetry, undulating neck ruffles and dresses whose skirts gathered vertically around the body, were brilliantly put together and endlessly new.  Although the prints may have been unexpected the results were incredible, placing this show amongst the best of the week.

http://www.marykatrantzou.com/

-Mario Casarella