Blast from the Past

Written by Vanessa Zaree
04.03.2010

We’re only just getting our heads around Giles Deacon’s Sixties chicks, but he’s not the only designer who did a bit of time-travelling this season. Looks like we’ll have to revise our list of movie rentals because Marco Zanini at Rochas mentioned late sixties film “Cactus Flower” as his main source of inspiration for Winter ‘10.

The beehive hair, smoky eyes, bee-stung lips… the models couldn’t have looked any more Brigitte Bardot-esque. But, first and foremost, it was the clothes that made us feel like we were looking at fashion photographs from the sixties. Cute A-line dresses, sweet granny-looking jumpers styled with tiny waist-belts and flared trousers looked straight out of an old Vogue issue. The coats and jackets, many of them with cropped sleeves, were beautifully structured; one of the star pieces was a cheetah-printed ponyskin coat. The soft colours used such as light blue, brown and yellow, made the collection all the more enjoyable. The modern elements were definitely there – golden prints, more luxurious than psychedelic, jazzed up garments and giant ruffles added edge to sleeves and hem lines. Towards the end, the frocks had a slightly tougher attitude than the pleasingly sweet looks that opened the show. More than a reinterpretation, the show was pretty much a straight-forward replica of this much-loved era.

That’s not to say we were not completely charmed by the collection – it would be pretty much impossible not to be. In a season that has marked the return of more wearable trends, it’s perfectly understandable that designers kept looking back at the decade that set a before and after in fashion history. Get your groove on, we say.