DESIGN
VIKTOR & ROLF FASHION ARTISTS
National Gallery of Victoria, St Kilda Road
Until February 26
Reviewed by Penny Webb
Sitting pretty in their Amsterdam headquarters, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (both born 1969) tell curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot: "We barely look at the work of others, and we have never really followed any trends."
Nevertheless, in the spirit of honouring precursors at the NGV, this review acknowledges the visionary designers who made possible "the ground on which" Viktor & Rolf (their brand name) now stand.
Fashion elders past and present whom Horsting and Snoeren mention in telling their story include Yves Saint Laurent, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcon and Martin Margiela, the Antwerp-trained Belgian.
When Horsting and Snoeren left the Netherlands in 1992 to make a go of it in Paris, a former Arnhem Academy classmate was an (unpaid) intern with Maison Martin Margiela.
Unable to enter the industry, the cash-strapped duo developed a showmanship in bringing their work to public attention. (Now acknowledged by the French industry's trade federation, albeit in the modest degree available to a foreign house, calling themselves "fashion artists" may suggest an attachment to a supposed romanticism of the outsider.)
Thanks to Dutch lenders the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and the Groningen Museum, we can examine three works from that first decade, starting with eight of the nine "preparations" that comprised the astonishing Russian Doll event of 1999.
From a short, jute-mesh sheath, to a final massive jute cloak, this thrilling opening installation takes the idea of an autumn-to-winter accumulation of layers to an absurd degree.
Adjacent is the distressed ballgown from the triple-award-winning Hyeres Festival ensemble of 1993, while just inside the second gallery is the three-part Winter of Love installation of 1994. These three series of works, and a 1996 poster campaign On Strike, remain strong statements of artistic intent.
What followed, we are informed, was a less creatively rewarding period designing for the ready-to-wear industry. Is this a conceit? During this supposedly creatively straitened time, the duo produced, from 2005 to 2010, the collections Flowerbomb (also the name of their top-selling fragrance), Bedtime Story, NO, Shalom, and the fabulous Cutting Edge Couture, all represented in the second gallery.
So, when you walk around Zen Garden of 2013-14, with its five centrally positioned black-robed figures that evoke the silhouettes of moss-covered boulders seen against a pattern of racked gravel as in a Japanese garden, bear in mind the duo had, by this time produced almost 30 seasons of ready-to-wear fashions.
While Horsting and Snoeren have a taste for self-aggrandisement (see the four jacquard tapestries), they have entered the spotlight of the theatre of the runway to usefully demonstrate the mutability of their designs.
From the robing of American model Maggie Rizer during the runway presentation of Russian Doll and Zen Garden's massing of voluminous clothing on and off the models to 2015's Wearable Art, the duo's theatrical approach to fashion comes full circle with this year's Vagabonds collection that reprises the distressed look of the Hyeres ballgown.
Scaled replicas of designs adorn the show's many dolls, one of which jerkily traverses a runway. These pint-sized mannequins may reference fashion's pre-digital age, but compared with the sylphs on the many video screens, they expose how easy it is to distort design, thereby taking the life out of fashion.
Finally, seen in the kids' activities space, the dress with many bows that Mabel Wisse Smitt wore in 2004 to wed Prince Friso of Orange-Nassau is a reminder that fairytales do not always end well. But kids know that.