Haute Couture and flowers: Art in fashion or Fashion as an art

“Fashion is not an art, but to work on it you must be an artist”

 Yves Saint-Laurent

Many will wonder what a fashion post replies in a blog about art. Maybe we have surrendered to its world of banality and exhibition? We would like to steer a debate to our readers about the facets of fashion and the different views of it, a debate started long ago as seen in the words of the aforementioned French couturier: Is fashion a matter for which art is required or is in fact an art in itself?

To answer these questions we must begin by asking what we call a work of art or an artist's productions: does any difference a marked and visible style along a path of productions? Do we ask for any retail development and almost unique? For a final result of artistic aesthetics and clear visual effects? Are we in search of a captivating personality? And finally for any expression of the soul of the artist? Let’s consider if we can find in the productions of haute couture these features and even more, all in a relaxed way through the vision of the latest floral trends in the spring-summer season, where flowers are combine with transparencies and spring bright color. Let’s see how each designer adapts these features to their own style:

Let's start with Valentino, whose parade was the finishing touch to the Haute Couture’s Week in Paris. After the great couturier retired from the world of fashion, Maria Grazia and Pier Paolo Piccioli Chiuri are directing now the brand designs, this season filled with romantic floral blend and pastel textures.

Giambattista Valli proposes a design mostly sober colours and bases on lace. The flowers Valli recreates are scattered over the bodice in a sculptural form, like a field dotted with roses, in a degradation of transparencies.

Dior, a paradigm of the French "ateliers" and the production of its "maisons", returns to the sobriety of French charm thanks to Hill Gaytten, the new artistic director after the fall of the popular John Galliano. In that collection flowers do not take the power and are reduced to an option, treated on discrete embroidered in strategic locations of the dress.

Elie Saab, instead, notes his own style by showing dresses the main element are the transparencies made with sheer delicate lace pieces. These pieces are embroidered with flowers, but these flowers are carved on beads, stones and crystals: making their productions a jewel-dress that seems to float around the woman.

George Hobeika's productions for this summer are inspired by the aesthetics of the orchid, implemented mostly on cocktail dresses, dotted with flowers accompanied by beads and pearls in a more discrete amount.

 

Finally, allowing us a break to the previous autumn / winter season, we show you the striking productions of Zuhair Murad. This Lebanese designer’s dresses - in chiffon, tulle and silk - are built on the pitch "nude" and on the ambiguity that this allows: a game in which the line between the dress and the real skin is blurred. The cherry blossoms are what he proposes to cover this female transparency, thanks to a sculptural and pictorial elaboration on the basic tones of Oriental art: red and black.

As we have seen, each one of the designers displayed and developed his own style, which gives a unique and easily recognizable to each of the brands they manage. Haute couture is the ultimate expression of fashion design, a field in which designers can express their creativity freely,creativity without limits of budget or style. According to that, does fashion responds to any of the characteristics of art? Which has and which rejected? Can we say that each of these dresses are works of art whose exhibition takes place in a different area of the sculpture or painting? Or is it another example of the decline of a fashion crisis? ... We encourage you to let your opinions in order to start an interesting debate that will continue in the next post, looking at the Pret-à-Porter.