Tinkering with tailoring seems to be seasonal obsession with designers for Autumn/Winter 2010 – if a pocket can be displaced, the motto seems, it should be displaced, slicing and dicing the traditional three-piece and re-assembling the pieces like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and with a similar genius-cum-naivety dependent on the designer’s talent. This was the game Lutz Huelle chose to play for his Lutz collection, but given his propensity for this kind of trickery and deconstruction, he had the upper hand to begin with. Lutz seemed to slice and tailor his details from seemingly free-falling panes of cloth, thus a great swathe of raw-edged wool whorled around a torso, with trench-coat collar, pocket and hem dropping out of the massed fabric. On the flip side, fabric was draped over the shoulders into a cape, whose form was magically interrupted by a pair of detached sleeve heads created by vents sliced into uninterrupted fabric – tricky to describe, even more difficult to make, but effortless in execution. Amongst all the clever-clever fabric play, the latter indeed seemed especially magical, and an inventive twist in a season when every other designer seems to be chopping and tugging forms apart in search of edge. The cape dominated the show, in both this form and sometimes another trompe l’oeil interpretation: jacket in front with faux-sleeves peeling away into a swinging cloak at back pulled taut with a belt. The strength of these experiments, ironically, was one of the collection’s drawbacks – the draped, wrapped and pulled silk crepe frocks were terribly sweet, but just didn’t have the excitement or energy of Lutz’s faultless tailoring. That could easily have stood alone, and been even better for it.
Report by Alex Fury on 4 March 2010.
http://showstudio.com/collection/lutz_paris_womenswear_a_w_10
lutzhuelle.blog 