Fairy tales were used as the inspiration for some of the looks featured at Paris Fashion Week this year. Vivienne Westwood (pictured above) said that her models looked like people you would encounter in the Black Forest in fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. When discussing why she chose fairy tales as her inspiration, Vivienne Westwood said, “The traditional folklore fairy tale is very important for children as there is deep psychology in it. Fairy tales are about dealing with danger, injustice and terrible morality. They help children to become independent and mature by facing up to all kinds of things on an imaginative level. The great thing is the hero always wins in the end, even when he is a simpleton or an un-empowered person.” Overall, it sounds like she takes the psychoanalytical perspective on fairy tales.
Westwood was considering calling her latest Gold Label “Sleeping Beauty” but ultimately went with “Prince Charming.” She had some of her models wearing large rubber crowns, penciled-on mustaches, bobbed wigs, and tights to make them look the part. Some of the clothes did give the models a somewhat masculine appearance since they were bulky with broad shoulders. Westwood said that she was thinking of the "Principle Boy" in pantomimes when she was putting together the whole look. Not all of the models looked so masculine; some models looked like princesses and others looked like they could be Gretel. And then there were some that didn't really look like any fairy tale character in particular.
Westwood never specifically said that she was commenting on gender roles or the female identity and how they have (or have not) changed since the Grimm’s fairy tales were first published. It's still an interesting possibility, especially for someone in the fashion industry.
Here is what Westwood had to say about her new collection and a video of her runway show is below.
I found some interesting fairytale fashions as well. I came across an artist, Valerie Lamontagne, who had designed wearable art based on fairy tales. I first noticed that she had designed three dresses based on the tale “Donkeyskin” and eventually found another dress that she had designed based on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen.” In Perrault’s tale, there are three dresses which are supposed to be made of sky, moonbeams, and sunlight. Lamontagne made dresses to express these elements using advanced technology to embody them; she does not however attempt a glamorous take on the donkeyskin dress. All of the dresses are linked to weather stations so that they are able to reflect real life conditions.
ReplyDeleteIn the sky dress she included air pockets that would fill or empty based on the wind conditions. The sun dress is covered with LED lights that turn on and off to reflect the brightness of the sun. There are flowers on the moon dress, which change colors based on the phase of the moon. (I don't know how to put in pictures, but you can see them here http://www.valerielamontagne.com/peaudane.html or here http://www.ecouterre.com/13502/fairy-tale-inspired-interactive-weather-gowns-made-from-sun-moon-sky/).
I think that this is a very interesting take, and update, on fairy tales. She is taking something very traditional and making it extremely modern and high-tech. She also says on her website that “this project explores the potential for wearables to become agents of performativity.” I think that this is very interesting. It seems like she is trying to introduce fairy tales into a whole new kind of media, and allow the clothes to tell the stories.
Just like fairy tales have gone form oral to written to preformed, now it seems that she is trying to express them through fashion, and this seems to be just what Westwood was trying to do in her runway show. The only difference between the two really seems to be that Westwood has put her own distinctive spin on fairy tales as many people have done in the past, whereas Lamontagne tries to be as close to the original as possible. Her dedication to accuracy reminded me of what Angela Carter said about herself as a collector in the introduction to “The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book” about how she tried to remain as close to the original as possible. In general, I think the fact that fairy tales continue to expand to new forms of media shows how pervasive, important, and appreciated they are within our culture.