Fetish has long been a favorite fashion influence: Alexander McQueen's Spring '98 metal-spine corset, Louis Vuitton's Fall '11 Night Porter collection, and Azzedine Alaia's iconic eighties bondage dresses come to mind.Fetish has long been a favorite fashion influence: Alexander McQueen's Spring '98 metal-spine corset, Louis Vuitton's Fall '11 Night Porter collection, and Azzedine Alaia's iconic eighties bondage dresses come to mind. Considering its prominence over the decades, it's perhaps no surprise that the trend has surfaced again for Spring '14, only this time around, it's a bit more subtle—particularly in the collections that have employed plastic or leather shoulder-length gloves. Thom Browne turned out an haute American Horror Story: Asylum take on the trend, of sorts, in New York, replete with second-skin white latex options. These mitts featured glued-on nails, which lent a synthetic perverseness to the designer's vision. In London, Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff of Meadham Kirchhoff hit their stride in a mashed-up collection of Jacobean flair and East London kook. Here, too, bicep-brushing gloves appeared (in python, no less). Looser than Browne's, MK's proposal suggested something a butcher or welder might don. And in Paris, Jun Takahashi showed a patent black pair at Undercover, which he styled with an anagrammatic top trimmed in a swath of matte black leather. That interplay suggested a charged message: The wearer of these defiant accoutrements is powerful, and entirely uninterested in conformity. Call it sartorial dominance.
POST: 2024-11-24