For Fall 2012 Mary Katrantzou, Balenciaga and Peter Pilotto offered a selection of beautiful prints, from classic floral interpretations to those a little more strangely inspired.
Print vanguard Mary Katrantzou looked to the everyday for her Fall 2012 collection. (For her team this involved buying up boxes of yellow school pencils and pink erasers.) Despite a simple concept, the results were far from ordinary. Spoons, typewriter keys, rotary telephone dials and garden hedges were ordered, patterned and reflected as bold placement prints against her structured angular designs. Each season Katrantzou continues to produce a print fantasia, sourcing new inspiration to be translated into an illusory visual feast, theatrical, yet somehow wearable.
For Fall 2012 Balenciaga became Balenciaga Inc.: an eighties, sci-fi inspired office of power-playing business women. In the midst of Ghesquière’s reliable turnout of technical innovation and precisely executed tailoring, silk satin sweater tops, emblazoned with ambiguous slogans like ‘Join a Weird Trip’ and ‘Out of the Blue’ added the essential element of surprise. Citing Steven Spielberg’s 2001 ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Micheal Clayton’ as sources of inspiration, Ghesquière, succeeded in setting the scene for his eighties-anchored projection of a futuristic sterile corporate world, cemented by his choice of location; the 27th floor of an office building in the business district of Paris.
In 2011 Peter Pilotto and design partner Christopher De Vos, journeyed to Asia to meet their sleek and sophisticated fan following. Stopping in Hong Kong and Beijing, the trip was not just a meet and greet, the pair returned with new ideas for their print art, creating their signature crisscross prints from Japanese trucks and Chinese opera masks. But our favourites were the hyper-coloured macro florals resembling the opening of an orchid (in royal blue, purple and grey colourways) and the blooming Asian-native chrysanthemums cradled by electric green foliage.
