The One Look Series is a four-part series that highlights writing pieces from the Fashion Journalism course. Students were asked to write a piece based off of one selected look from SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film‘s current exhibition, “Kaleidoscope Katrantzou: Mary Katrantzou, 10 Years in Fashion.”
Looking through a glass of perfume
by Tia Charmaine
Known for her insightful approach to design and digital prints, Mary Katrantzou’s 10 years in the industry are celebrated in the Savannah College of Art and Design’s SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film exhibition “Kaleidoscope Katrantzou.”
The first garment on the left of the entrance was worn on the runway by teenage model Jourdan Dunn for London Fashion Week in 2009. The Greek-born women’s wear designer, now living and working in London, is hailed as “the queen of prints” for such digitally printed motifs.
This dress by Katrantzou, who has a background in architecture and training in textiles and fashion design, operates as a commencement to the evolution of her career.
Ten years ago, when the world was plunged deep into a financial crisis, Katrantzou debuted her trompe l’oeil shift dresses with digitally printed graphics on synthetic fabric.
Her “Black Shalimar” dress is a basic-cut shift dress that has a black silhouette in the foreground and resembles an hourglass shape with a simplified, symmetrically balanced image of a perfume bottle as a colorful graphic.
It is part of Katrantzou’s “Woman in a Bottle” collection from her Fall 2009Ready-to-Wear collection. Her signature use of trompe-l’œil and prints is reflective of glass and perfume bottles.
“Objects of nature can be applied to the human figure, so I began taking them as prints and making them into dress form,” Katrantzou recalls. “I found a printer called the Silk Bureau here in London.” she adds, laughing, “They did it in their garage.”
On the other side of the museum exhibition is mannequin number 87 out of the 88 looks on view. A part of her 10-year anniversary show for her Spring/Summer 2019 Ready-to-Wear collection is another rendition of the woman-in-a-bottle dress, called the “Shalamore Dress,” noted for its dramatic differences in length, material and functionality.
The new dress is digitally printed on Swarovski mesh. In contrast to other digital prints on Swarovski crystals in the exhibition, this garment is painted over top of the mesh for preservation.
The Shalimar Dress, in contrast to other garments on display, is a figure-flattering proportional dress that is fully functional to wear. Katrantzou creates the perfume-bottle body as though it is the human body itself. She accentuates the contours of the female figure with the exaggerated hourglass silhouette.
Her first collection was all slip dresses because they were all she knew how to construct, according to a SCAD FASH docent. At the end of Katrantzou’s Spring/Summer 2019 finale, the long, printed crystal dress with the familiar image of a Shalimar perfume bottle came down the runway and amplified the memory of the first shift dress that opened Katrantzou’s first show—a landmark for how far she has come.
