Wandering Around The Palazzo

I never thought I'd say I had a 'painterly' evening especially since my terrifying art A-level when all my art teacher could say was "Be MORE painterly!" so much so that I ended up caking twenty tubes of acrylic paint onto a canvas.  I wasn't going to be "painterly" anyBLOODYmore.  That said, it was the occasion of Haider Ackermann's Carte Blanche event "Opium" as part of Pitti W last night and the venue, the location of Florence and his presentation of his womenswear pre-collection and S/S 11 menswear debut all accumulated into something that couldn't be described as anything but a painterly fest.  Or should it be feast? 

I'm not sure whether this is the natural state of the sumptuous late-Baroque period Palazzo Corsini, where the show took place or whether it had been given a faint layer of dust because as we entered, it immediately felt like we were stumbling upon rooms that had been deserted for a good amount of time with smidges of beautiful decay here and there.  From several lowly lit chambers to small courtyard to a truly Baroque-ly riDONCulous indoor fountain we were then presented with a Bacchanalian feast… 

… under the low light, Caravaggio's chiaroscuro techniques awashed the room (with most guests in the dark side so I couldn't actually make out faces…) but the visceral and clearly symbolic mounds of in-season fruit (everything was suspiciously sweet…?) and abundance of wine on a long feasting table definitely had none of the sobriety that Caravaggio depicted in his serious feasts…

I half hoped people would start feeding each other fruit and pouring wine from the decanters… damn self-conscious reserve… dotted around the table were piles of books that were for the taking… a beautifully hardback assemblage of contributions (inspiration images, poetry, significant lists) especially to mark the occasion of this event in Florence. 

Then we were led into the main courtyard where night was just beginning to fall but out little corner of intense decadence was lit up by suspended chandeliers.  If you're finding my superlatives, retch-inducing, I'd like to say that my fingers are auto-typing this because it was THAT pictoresque and causes nothing but a case of over-zealous "creative" writing.  There was a slight fear of rain for the evening as it had been chucking it down earlier in the day but the skies were clear and darkness fell pretty quickly whilst guests were getting settled down…

…in a mix of antique chaise lounges, chairs and sofas, one of which Alex Fury of SHOWstudio and I bagged… Alex described me as looking a little 'Valentino-esque' in my Roberto Furlanetto coat (more of that later) but here I'm rocking the Disney-eyed look… any moment now, I might have said "Isn't this MAGICAL?"

Silence was the initial sountrack and you could cut the air with a chopper as the show opened with the faint starting up of the discordant violins and cello with one female silhouette slowly walking around before a few minutes of quiet anticipation ensued.  Then Jamie Bochert completed the soundtrack with her haunting vocals and beautiful piano playing (I didn't know she even played…) and we were languidly presented with a compact collection of no more than about 15 outfits from both the womens and mens collections.  I've come to notice that the Carte Blanche events at Pitti have always meant that the narrative of the clothes are expressed in the venue choice, the surroundings, the hospitality as well as all the paraphernalia that comes with the event (the books we got to take away…) and that you end up taking the whole thing as one big package, lulled into a Florence-induced trance where suddenly everything is beautiful. 

Haider Ackermann though did give a great deal of visual narrative which finished up in the show, he imagined a woman wandering through a Palazzo; what the Haider Ackermann woman would look like in a Palazzo setting such as the one at Corsini.  The journeying woman of the past few seasons continues to travel but she has perhaps momentarily stood still in the Palazzo and allowed her body to be draped and knotted very effortlessly at the bodice, leaving the neckline low, backs bare and the rest of the silhouette trailing the floor with beautiful fabrics like he has done with previous collections.  Whenever I speak to Ackermann about his women each season, the answer seems to always revolve around a journey and I guess the lines that he creates on the body with the language of drape is always on a journey in itself.  Pockets, zippers and knots might join the draping along the way but that 'flow' of fabric is constant from season to season.  In this instance, the pre-collection womenswear has been given an obi-inspired form of knotting in the middle as well as the surprise introduction of a subtle leopard print in one of the silhouettes. 

What of the much-awaited menswear which arguably stole the show?  Steve will have some choice words but seeing as I had imagined something wildly different in my head, to see an array of embroidered textiles and textures feature quite prominently in the clothes was a bit of a shocker.  A good kind of shocker though.  Ackermann talked about trying to find the man behind that woman which has been travelling around, and for S/S 10, as his womenswear had a Passage through India moment, his menswear has also had a textiles whirlwind tour there too.  I'm not sure why I didn't expect such a bold statement as a first menswear collection but it was good to see that this wasn't just about testing the waters with some flimsy man-sized interpretations of his womenswear sales pieces.  If Ackermann had imagined a modern eclectic travelling wardrobe where pieces were easy to shrug on and nothing was too form-fitting, then he succeeded.  That the clothes came with the extra bells and whistles that repeated the motifs from the womenswear pre-collection with a gusto towards layering, only made the show more cohesive.  Need I use nauseating painterly language here when the strokes of print, colour and texture mixing can be seen better in the official images… (my ones only capture my frustration at  not being able to take decent images without wretched flash…)    

The book to remember this occasion by feels like a journal but is in fact contributed by the likes of Antony Hegarty, Katherine Jebb and Francesco Bonami (I love his opening passage which goes some way to explaining Haider Ackermann's vision of the Palazzo…).  I'm not sure whether the images gathered up in the book or the lists of significant songs and inspiring personalities are necessarily specific to the collections presented in Florence but the book is a lovely memento that will always prompt me to queue up to ask Haider Ackermann post-show about what he is thinking about, even all he gives up is the word "Journey".