Summary
“Viktor, Viktor! There’s a hole in my dress!”
“Be quiet, madam, or they’ll all want one.”
The whopping great voids in Viktor & Rolf’s S/S10 collection are far from the sort you’d darn or slap an elbow patch over. They are aspirational. You wouldn’t be embarrassed about them in front of other people’s parents or someone who earns more than you; they’re a focal point - and that's, ahem, the hole point.
“Art tears a hole in reality,” said the artist Tadeusz Kantor. An intentional hole signals how far you are from suburban smugness; it’s the active ruination of something that a very different sort of consumer might have thought was already pristine. A hole is the finishing touch of the perfectionist creator, one who must be present at a garment’s inception and at its destruction.
It’s no surprise then, that Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons first showed ripped yarn jumpers in the Eighties that looked like they’d been hustled off a tramp before getting to the shops. Margiela too was an early holey man, slashing cocktail gowns and coats straight across the middle, often with lining trailing out like silky innards.
When times are good, looking bourgeois is bad – it’s commercial and prissy. But when times are bad, looking bourgeois is cool, presumably because it goes down better at job interviews.
Viktor & Rolf’s gaping gowns are different though: they’re a synthesis of the bourgeois and the backlash, and it’s perfect for these confusing economic climes. Sure, it’s a statement about our modes of dress and ideas of formality, but it also looks damn good and no-one will think you’re a scruff.
Harriet Walker is a fashion writer at The Independent
Zoë Taylor graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Her work
has appeared in Le Gun, Bare Bones, Ambit and Dazed & Confused. She is currently working on her third graphic novella and an exhibition
