Brilliant Paris designer Stephane Rolland took his craft to a new level, with a spring-summer 2010 haute couture collection of cocktail dresses spattered with gleaming lacquer and lean evening gowns that sprouted what looked like dinosaur vertebrae.
Rolland, who was formerly at Jean-Louis Scherrer before launching his signature label in 2007, has long blended the line between fashion and art with sculptural garments that bulge with bustles and capes and 1960s-shaped mini-dresses embellished with painstaking geometric mosaics.
But this time, Rolland took the shards of laser-cut plexiglass he uses for the mosaics and flipped them 90 degrees, so they stuck up from the fabric's surface in stiff ridges. Aligned one alongside another, they formed astonishing volumes, and looked like stiff Elizabethan lace collars, oversized ivory bangles, or the fossilized, half-buried remains of spiny dinosaurs.
"I really wanted my woman to be sophisticated, with a hint of mystery and a spot of danger," Rolland told The Associated Press in a pre-show interview.
And dangerous she was. Ultra-glossy splotches dripped down from the necklines of asymmetrical jumpsuits and a scarlet stain that had the colour and sheen of fresh blood soaked up from the hemline of a razor-cut skirt suit in ecru silk. The gloss was developed with a chemist to mimic the brilliant shine of lacquer, while retaining the pliability of rubber. The mixture required 20-30 painstaking coats, Rolland said.
Other standout looks from the jaw-dropping collection included a cocktail dress in off-white silk that sprouted an ornate collar and cuffs made of the clinking plastic bits and a long lean gown in purple wool with an armour of scarlet spikes.
AP