When fashion is made of glass

Delimiting the realm of fashion is by no means easy and may not even be possible. Over the decades, countless, often daring experiments have been conducted with an endless number of fabrics, innovative techniques, various manipulations and the ever more daring combination of all the elements mentioned so far. Among the most complex materials designers have approached is certainly glass, both in its very essence, as the actual silicon, and in all its implementations and reinterpretations through optical effects, texture games and conceptual similarities. One could therefore speak of the so-called "glass fashion" to refer to this trend, which has taken place in changing stages in recent history.

It is almost obligatory to start with the Turkish-Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan when it comes to the ability to adapt elements that are completely alien to the canonical notion of fashion and what can hypothetically affect this field. He is one of those creatives who have managed to take experimentation to a particularly extreme level, often highlighted by spectacular turns during his "show" fashion shows. The SS01 collection "Ventriloquy", in which Chalayan addresses the theme of the ephemerality of clothing and its relationship to time - one of the main leitmotifs of his work - concludes with a series of looks consisting of wide skirts in a glass-effect resin, which some models equipped with small hammers smash before the eyes of the astonished spectators. The idea of glass is interpreted in a completely different way by the designer, who loves special effects, in the SS07 collection with a dress made only of transparent spheres, also made famous by a 2009 performance by Lady Gaga. This second approach, realistic in the final result but more distant in terms of material, is reminiscent of the work of Pierre Cardin, who with his Space Age fashion, albeit with completely different results, played a lot with recreating portholes and volumes of spaceships by using PVC elements, which were then contextualised in his brilliantly crafted creations as well as in his unforgettable eyewear. In contrast, the manipulations Prada presented in the last looks of the SS10 collection were completely different. In a modern and very sophisticated re-imagining of 1920s dresses, they sparkled almost as if they were enveloping the models in the crushes of antique chandeliers, thanks to crystal drops that completely enveloped them.

And exactly, a chandelier becomes a dress, without conceptual transmissions, but literally with all its imposing structure, in Moschino's FW16 collection, presented by Jeremy Scott in a wild post-party scenario, among smoking - again literally - and tattered dresses, with that ironic glamour capable of laughing at itself, typical of the American designer. Among the designers who have made the ready-made and irony their trademark is Martin Margiela, who in 2009 launched a limited edition of pumps made of real glass that are clearly not wearable, but that is precisely why they fit so well with his Dadaist approach. The brand founder's throwback to absolute white was also echoed by his successor John Galliano, who created several looks in the SS16 prêt-à-porter collection with a mosaic of small, irregular glass fragments, celebrating his love of the past, albeit in a decidedly more "Margielian" way. Shards of glass, stitched together in a perfectly reflective composition with no trace of the past, also characterise some of the releases in Loewe's SS16 collection, signed by Jonathan Anderson, almost as if to prove a coordinated, contemporary focus on the theme with fellow designer Galliano. But Anderson reintroduced the concept of "glass fashion" in a very different key, both in SS22, in which anatomical-looking bodices are embedded in tops and dresses with voluminous and airy sleeves, and in the next collection, FW22, in which a T-shirt seems to come from a Murano glass-blowing workshop, transforming the British designer into a kind of sculptor who is, as always, very refined and able to concretise his innovative ideas superbly.
Concluding this account of fashion's interpretation of glass are the proposals of Belgian designer Iris van Herpen, who, with similar results to Anderson but with a much more pronounced tendency towards scientific experimentation, proposes structures that crystallise huge splashes of water in a temporal suspension, in both the SS11 prêt-à-porter and subsequent couture collections. A few years later, in the FW16 prêt-à-porter collection, his "glass fashion" becomes a geometric and architectural framework reminiscent of modern transparent domes, showing how the same concept can be declined in infinite combinations, even by the same creative mind.