A Tale of Two Shitties

This is the story of two dresses. Both were wacky-looking things, but one was wacky with a purpose and one was just plain wacky.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Strangely enough, Lupe had the best materials with which to work. She had a lot of fabric with beautiful colors and a bold print. She could have gone in almost any direction.

She chose this one.

***

Excuse us for a moment, kittens. We just vomited a little in our mouths and we need a breath strip.

There.

Ugh. It hurts just to look at it. We're fine with designers who desire to go off in crazy, expressive, nontraditional directions. We applaud it, in fact. But you absolutely have to have some thought behind your decisions. Otherwise, it's the fashion equivalent of a 3-year-old doing finger-painting. She just stuck shit on it and ruched it haphazardly and there's no reason to it; no theme - unless you consider "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" a theme.

It's a pretty sad commentary when the most accomplished thing about the garment is how well the bow was tied.

Then there's Santino. Despite the title of the post (which we couldn't resist) we actually like this dress.

Ignoring the styling (which is atrocious), this is a bold look that manages to hearken back to more traditional forms in fashion, like hoop skirts and bustles, while being as nontraditional as a dress can get.

Yes, it's a highly unconventional garment and the vast majority of women out there wouldn't even think of wearing such a thing, but aesthetically, we think it's quite beautiful.

And simply gorgeously made. Later in the season, Santino established a reputation for deconstruction, but this is a highly structured work and we come away from it with the impression that every choice was deliberate and came from both a real place inside him as well as a well-developed sense of aesthetics.

That is a masterpiece of construction - and a stroke of genius to forgo the other elements and use the lining of the jacket so extensively. Keeping the color palette completely neutral prevents this garment from going off into eye-bleed territory and calms the whole piece down.

We have a feeling we're going to hear a lot of disagreement in our comment section but we have to stress that this garment needs to be looked at from a conceptual point of view and not a wearability or saleability point of view. Lupe's was for the most part conceptual as well. The difference here is, she didn't really have a concept behind her conceptual garment and Santino did.



[Screencaps: projectrungay.blogspot.com]


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