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Fashion Notes:  Style at Mugler

During a debate on body image, held a few years ago in the midst of all the ‘size zero’ press, designer Roland Mouret told a packed lecture theatre at the London College Of Fashion that he preferred his ladies with a bit of meat on them.  The designs he creates flatter women of all shapes and sizes but he found that his clothes didn’t hang as intended on models who were simply skin and bones.  However, one of the most interesting points he made was that women with shape and curves can look too sexy for the catwalk, drawing attention away from the clothes.  It was one of the arguments for many designers choosing super-skinny, uniform models as they were to be little more than clothes horses, displaying the designer’s art in the same way that galleries often hang fine art prints on blank walls.

Last week the fashion world’s attention became focused on a young tattooed Canadian, Rick ‘Rico’ Genest, when he appeared on the catwalk at Mugler.  With Rico’s skeleton etched on the surface of his skin, from hollow eyes to taut neck veins, he’s impossible to ignore and has been talked about as much as the clothes he was wearing.

“Some grumbling was heard in the audience: This was styled more than designed, the criticism ran, a moving editorial rather than a fashion show”

This comment by Matthew Schneier was part of his Style.com review of the Mugler Menswear show.  It raises the issue of style versus fashion on the catwalk and with Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga’s stylist, tugging the reins of Creative Director at Mugler, there was no doubt that Romain Kremer’s designs for the label would be shown with a certain amount of bombast.  The show was visually coherent, creating a sinister mood with a few notes of feminine beauty, but how much of the viewers’ attention has been focused on the clothes themselves?

At Dsquared²’s Autumn/Winter 2011 menswear show, the models were stripped of their character, styled in wide-brimmed hats and glasses which disguised any individual facial characteristics and made them the desired blank canvases.  Yet rather than the models distracting from the clothes, it was the camped-up styling and snowscape set which provided the show’s intrigue and excitement, and disguised fairly tame designs where the individual pieces, on the whole, lacked innovation.

With Mugler, Formichetti has clearly put a great amount of effort into the styling of his first show for the label.  Embracing multimedia, a short film by Mariano Vivanco starred the tattooed Rico in some of the new Mugler designs and provided a backdrop to the catwalk, while a remix of new Lady Gaga song ‘Scheiße’ accompanied.  Also using the chosen models’ individual characteristics as a feature rather than covering them up, there were a lot of elements to the Mugler show which could provide distraction.  However, I feel that even though the characteristics of models like Rico may steer attention away from the clothes at first, ultimately they enhance the designs and the overall image that’s being created for the new Mugler.  The uniform models preferred by so many fashion houses would not have shown the pieces off as well, and perhaps this is where the argument for there being more style than fashion at Mugler comes from.

However, when the Mugler pieces are taken off the catwalk and seen individually, it’s a different story to the one at Dsquared², as these designs can stand out on their own without excessive styling.  There is some great design from Romain Kremer and it makes many items quite versatile.  A box cut jacket in royal blue, python skin effect velvet was simply stunning, while the fluidity of wide-legged trousers was a beautiful offset to fitted neoprene and Hulk-sized suit jackets.

It seems that the design at Mugler has been appreciated more in the wake of the menswear show than during it.  The initial shock factor of the show’s styling has worn off, leading to praise for the collection.  “The real surprise was how beautifully cut and elegant many of the pieces were”, was Vogue.com’s opinion and it seems that as long as the designs are strong, they won’t be masked by the styling, merely complimented.

(Picture credit: Style.com/Yannis Vlamos at GoRunway.com/Mugler)