Prints

Despite their chintzy reputation, prints are far from an outdated choice. For spring/summer 2011, designers displayed visual wit and wickedness through graphic etchings, manipulated digitalism and animal renderings across all types of clothing.

Before the Renaissance, textile prints were an ecclesiastical niche, meant for lectern cloths and venerated chasubles, not mere trend-following mortals. But by the time an exiled French trader set up the first British-based print works on the banks of the Thames in the 1670s, patterned cloths and linens were already fashionable on the continent. Their spriggy gaiety spoke of wealth and whimsy during the ostentatious Georgian and Regency eras, before Victorian piety checked their progress. Even so, they made a return, with the introduction of industrial practices and the birth of mass production, and by the fin de siècle era, every girl could choose her prints and look charming.

There’s something independent and outspoken about adding a graphic dimension to a garment, especially after so many seasons of neo-Gothicism and quiet, minimal luxury. Fashion this season is about wearing your heart on your sleeve, quite literally in the case of Miu Miu’s Day-Glo resort show, which featured flippy neon hearts on trousers and shell tops. The spring collection took things even further with dynamite bangs warping into prisms, flowers, and even hexagonal splodges.

And when Miuccia Prada decides the time is right for prints, she does them wholesale across both her collections. After last spring’s tailored pieces, which featured a mimeographed beach scene splashed across shorts, blouses and shift dresses, came brash baroque curlicues printed onto cotton separates, and raucous, heart-squeezingly naïve banana prints, which decorated boxy, mannish shirts. It’s a winsome statement, a declaration that clothes can be fun once more.

Christopher Kane’s prints came after a host of neon lace separates in his spring/summer show, and they felt almost like a microscopic glimpse right into the very weft and weave of the fabric. Indistinct and yet hyperreal, they seemed to indiscriminately merge engorged spots with psychedelic floral swirls, the animal with the anatomical. There were capillary-like fronds that whispered of dissection, bringing to mind the platelet prints that adorned Marios Schwab’s bodycon cocktail dresses in summer 2008.

But where prints can sometimes summon  thoughts of cartoonish caricatures, they are also indicative of archetypes. And the time is ripe for a resurrection of these, because no one seems quite sure of fashion’s new direction. Riccardo Tisci’s womanly leopard prints at Givenchy invoke the age-old femme fatale but appeared on romantic, trailing chiffon panelled with frontal planes of deconstructed, masculine blazers. How’s that for mixed messages?

Zoë Taylor has appeared in Le Gun, Bare Bones, Ambit and Dazed & Confused. She is currently working on her third graphic novella and an exhibition.