Mary Katrantzou cements her extraordinary vision with tenth anniversary collection
Mary Katrantzou launched her label ten years ago with a small collection of shift dresses. The shape of the pieces was simple, but the design - exuberant images of elaborate jewellery covering the length of the garment - was tantalising.
Her skill for manipulating ideas into these seductive and witty patterns placed her at the forefront of a new wave of digital print specialists - including Erdem and Peter Pilotto - leading a colour explosion in London fashion.
This trio has impressively - given that they all launched their labels during the biggest financial crisis for a generation - not just survived, and as Katrantzou’s anniversary show last night attested, but thrived on the challenge of developing the design oeuvre. They are also great examples of what can happen with strong support, having all benefitted from the BFC NewGen funding initiative; Katrantzou’s profile raised early with a Topshop collaboration in 2012. But with the high street in its own dire straights, there is a concern that these valuable partnerships maybe difficult to resurrect for new talent coming through.
Katrantzou’s show at The Roundhouse took pause to consider and reimagine her decade of work, extrapolating her own original themes and ideas and combining them with the technical expertise she and her team have developed over that time. The result was extraordinary.
From those humble print on jersey beginnings, the Central St Martins textile MA graduate, has developed an incredible range. A collection which played on her Greek roots (she is Athenian but now has British citizenship) saw postage stamps printed across her pieces riffing off postcards sent from abroad. Here she miniaturised the stamps - each featuring a motif from one of her past collection- into a sort of orderly lattice, each “stamp” rendered in Swarovski crystals - another enduring relationship.
It was a collection of collections, but not purely limited to herself, a wide skirted prom look was covered by thousands of delicately embroidered shells, in part inspired by Princess Margaret’s penchant for gathering crustaceans. In this way, Katrantzou has learnt to take those initial vivid prints and given them life, using fabrics and couture level techniques (she has previously worked with the House of Lesage) to bring her garments an incredible three dimensional depth.
It is her imagination of the ordinary that has made the most impact: vintage fabric badges picked up in a bric a brac store in Dallas became an exploration uniform and identity sewn into grand, almost medieval, sweeping gowns. She closed her show with a raised curtain unveiling this and the rest of her mesmerising back catalogue.
In her very first runway show she printed exotic looking perfume bottles onto her silk dresses. For this collection the models were turned into actual bottles, walking in impressively constructed bulbous shapes, her finale gowns (surely destined for a red carpet spectacle soon) glistening in crystals, curved expertly to follow the model’s feminine lines.
A decade in this industry is a long time, especially given its ebbs and often perilous flows, but in cementing her vision here, Katrantzou has built a firm base for the future.
