A rising star on the runway for two years now, Mary Katrantzou’s Ceci n’est pas une chambre collection for SS11 was quite literally picture perfect. Images scanned straight from the pages of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors were digitally printed in all their high-life luxury upon a parade of dresses, capturing crystal-clear swimming pools, sprawling gardens and palatial parlours in pleasingly polite pastels of baby pink, mint and duck-egg blue.
Simply put, the concept was just so…clever. Where photography had flattened the architecture into two dimensions, trompe l’oeil prints played at bringing it back to life. But there's more! Katrantzou then took things full circle, decorating her dresses with physical furnishings - candelabra necklaces, billowing chiffon curtains and, best of all, structured skirts modelled on the most kitsch lampshades you’re likely to find outside of the designer’s native Greece.
Such hyperrealism isn’t just art for art’s sake though – much like its inspiration, René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Katrantzou’s re-imagined interiors cast a fresh eye over familiar objects and play with our perceptions of them. Seventies soft furnishings are suddenly seen as objects of beauty, and surprisingly wearable to boot. A room of one’s own? If only...
