A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with Alex Fury, discussing:
Prada Spring/Summer 2014
Tropical prints, looser, loucher shapes, a twenty-first century re-imagining of a twentieth-century American vacation. It was the fantasy rather than the reality of a Hawaii holiday that Prada was articulating for summer, I reckon.
Toting those suitcases longingly with your office drone suiting, trousers loosened up, that forties feel. Burnt umber and burgundy and evergreen and slithery satin bomber-jackets, all all those carnation and hibiscus prints plastered over everything. There was something of the land-locked, Tikki-tourist, those mid-century, middle-class middle-Americans who never made it to the tropics, but dreamed ceaselessly about it nevertheless. The sweaters with sunset scenes intarsia-knit into them were postcards - 'wish we were there', rather than 'wish you were here'. Just like the cheesecake pin-ups they'll never have, and those good-looking girls they'll never get, flouncing after them in flirtatious, diamanté-strewn showgirl dresses.
Mrs Prada's kick was unattainable fantasy. Except, it was her fantasy of that unattainable fantasy. And you can have it, at a price.
/ALEX
At least the sleeve layering added a moment of abstraction within an über-literal collection that got stuck in 1940s nostalgia - when the exotic image of Polyn-Asia was Americanised in memorabilia and gas station postcard kitsch. Here, irony reveals itself as not 'pretending to pretend' but 'being what is': derisory, pathetic, mediocre (to quote Mehdi Belhaj Kacem). I'd like to burn those memories.
/HORST
1.
Prada Spring/Summer 2014
2.
Elvis Presley Blue Hawaii, 1961
3.
Businessman 1950s
4.
Rolf Armstrong Sunny Skies, 1953
5.
Roy Lichtenstein Sunrise, 1984
6.
Wassily Kandinsky Tension In Red, 1926
7.
Ed Ruscha Burning Gas Station, 1966
8.
Prada Spring/Summer 2014
All about
Alex Fury
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