As designers go, Mary Katrantzou is a pointed mix of pragmatist and dreamer. "It's easier to sell a pre-collection when it's less specific," she said as she was fishing through a rack of clothes that, if not necessarily as theme-driven as some of her past triumphs, was still a remarkable elaboration on a handful of idiosyncratic visual elements. The Welsh band Stereophonics, for instance, will never set the world alight with their journeyman pub-rock, but once upon a time they had an album sleeve of fluoro stripes that has lingered with Katrantzou until this very moment, when she could infect her Resort 2016 collection with sunray pleats that gaped to reveal a world of hidden color.
OK, there wasn't a theme as such, but Katrantzou was fascinated by the way op art artists of the 1960s used stripes and depth of color to trick the eye. Pleats were the perfect way to extend the deception. They allowed for lots of movement, which defined this collection the way embroidery used to for Katrantzou. The effect was especially striking when the single slit on a skirt opened to reveal an entire dancing concertina. She tiered pleats in separates for added mobility. And she also ran the stripes horizontally and in diagonal rainbows.
But that wasn't the only story she was telling. What says the coming of spring more than flowers? Katrantzou immersed herself in research and typically came up for air with something as left field as the artwork on French seed packets from the 1890s, so hyper-real in their color schemes that they sat quite comfortably with the op art. She inserted panels of flowers into broderie anglaise and invaded the lot with grommets to duplicate the holes in the lace. Sound unduly complex? It wasn't, simply because Katrantzou holds fast to her new design philosophy: Whenever it gets complicated, cut back. It's her path to the future.