It is weird—a sort of barely conceivable telescoping of time—to realize that Mary Katrantzou graduated from Central Saint Martins, M.A., in 2008 with precisely 10 shift dresses, each of them digitally printed with oversize images of jewelry (the evidence is in the archives of Vogue Runway). Well, look at her now, seven years on, filling the atrium on the Central Saint Martins campus with a large, immensely intricate body of work framed around Roma gypsy dress and cosmic stargazing—all of it visible in a vast mirror that reflected the lineup into infinity.
The G-forces exerted on any designer whose business has taken off so rapidly—Katrantzou sells around the world now—are extreme. But the remarkable thing about her is how she has adapted over that time, always carefully paying attention to critical feedback as she speeds forward. After breaking new territory with digital trompe l’oeil prints, which all too swiftly became a widespread style throughout the fashion world, she turned away from her computer and went into handcrafted embellishment. When people criticized her for being a decorator, she moved on to experimenting with sculpted shape. And when the response to that hinted that her experiments might be getting too cumbersome, she came back with what she presented tonight: a collection that combined tiny flower prints, micro sequins, and metallic quilting in weightlessly fluttery forms.
It is interesting—maybe even disturbing—to wonder why so many designers in Europe have been thinking about the folkloric costume traditions of the peoples of the Balkans, Romania, Hungary, and farther east. Can it be that the consciousness of mass migrations in the daily news is ending up processed into floral prints and collaged patchworks on pretty, fashionable dresses? If so, then Katrantzou is not the only designer or label that has become porous to those subconscious influences. Mini-rose prints on a black background even turned up on the Topshop runway four hours before Katrantzou’s show and, before that, in many variations, in the British designer Stuart Vevers’s Coach collection in New York City last week.
But Katrantzou, in her intelligent way, senses the danger of being boxed into a trend. In this outing, she also showed she can take on the challenge of proving she’s able to design without print, without color, and without embroidery or texture. Her passage of pieces involving solid black material, cut with couture-like exactitude into A-line skirts and fit-and-flare coat silhouettes, was surprising yet instantly desirable. Compared with the clothes she was making when she came out of CSM, this collection bore almost no relation stylistically. The only link between the two is lodged in Katrantzou’s constantly self-challenging brain. And the intellectual result, whatever it might be, elevated this season to another plane