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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Ripping the Collections: Chris, Part 2


Get your tomatoes and warm up your pitching arms, girls!




Heavy and depressing and uninteresting bordering on ugly. It completely obliterates whatever figure that model has. Another point - and for us, this is the biggest complaint we have about Chris' collection - it just doesn't look modern at all.


Similar to the first silk screened dress in that it's a very simple design where the print is doing all the work of garnering interest.



People keep asking "How can you say this collection is dark when Christian's was almost all black?" Take an objective look at this. It's not that it's black; it's that it's heavy and dour and depressing-looking. Christian's collection, whatever flaws people may think it had, was exuberant and over the top and even joyful. Looks like this are the exact opposite of that.


We give him a lot of credit for the materials he used. The safety pin skirt and the hair trim really made a statement. Unfortunately, looks like this, no matter how much people might not want to hear it, are the very definition of costumey. It's too severe and the silhouette is old. Very old.


This is interesting and we kind of like it. The bodice is very pretty. We hate the skirt, though. Again, not because we're grossed out by the hair but because it's just flat ugly. She looks like a muppet from the waist down.

It's hard to tell from the pictures, but poor Marcia could barely walk in this. She had to lean so far back to keep the wrap in place that we feared she was just going to topple backwards on the runway. And again, this look was very heavy and added about 30 pounds to her figure.

In the end, we have to go with the term the judges may have over-applied to him: costumey. In this instance, they were exactly right. In many cases, these clothes simply didn't make the wearers look better; they made them look heavier and older. All the interest was generated in the materials he used. When your strong points are safety pins and human hair, then yes, you're making costumes.

With its Catholic iconography and references to blood and body parts, this was a surprisingly goth collection, which means that it's extremely limited in terms of its appeal and in the end, pretty dated. We reiterate: there simply wasn't anything new or fresh-looking here. It was a lot of old-looking styles and silhouettes made more interesting by his choice of materials.

This isn't to say that we don't think Chris is talented. We do. He's enormously talented. He has a gift for making astonishingly dramatic looks utilizing a wide range of techniques and materials. It's just that this collection really hammered home the point that he should remain a costume designer and not a fashion designer. He has the potential to be a world class costumer but sadly, in our opinion, doesn't have the potential to be a world class designer.




[Photos: WireImage/Getty Images/Elle.com - Slideshow: Projectrungay.blogspot.com]


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