Hey, when your face is just bone, you don’t need a surname! Skeletally-tattooed model, ‘Rico’ was just one of Nicola Formichetti’s many novelty touches (for there were plenty) at his debut show for Thierry Mugler as creative director with Gaga soundtraking the proceedings. The carcass-inked Canadian looked eeew-freaky-cool and resembled a kinda ghost-zombie in the closing look, beneath a billowing white veil.

Let us set aside, for a moment, our disgruntled feelings on the true modus operandi of this holy trinity of minds. A few days ago we offered our pathos on the disagreeable nature of this – grabbing, perhaps, cynical, definitely - designer-celeb-stylist love-in. But all that aside, let’s just look at the clothes.

As some fashion ed's commented, this collection was more a ‘walking-editorial’ by way of its quirky whimsy: bare-tattooed exposed chests, ashen-grey faces, almost burqua-esque head scarves and waist-high wader-resembling dungarees all made for very fashion shoot flourishes. In between those, err, gratuitous moments there remained some very neat tailoring moments – the louche tailoring, drop-crotch pants were all signature, classic Mugler, in fact and very well executed.

The mostly navy-noir palette (broken hither-thither with the odd jolt of burnt umber and cream) absolutely underscored Formichetti’s gloomy agenda. In fact, most of the, ahem, comedy elements paid more lip service to co-designer Romain Kremer’s own eponymous line itself (the liquid-PVC overload, the masking of faces) than possibly Formichetti’s aesthetic design vision. Whatever, with no benchmark to truly discern the latter, one is only left to hypothesize. Intrigued, margainally impressed and definitely interested, at least.

Posted on January 25, 2011 at 8:54:57 by The Real Runway