At the Théâtre du Châtelet, a place with a history steeped in drama, opera and the avant-garde, Robert Wun staged not so much a fashion show as a full-scale spectacle. As if led by the spirit of Artaud, he introduced the audience to a world of anxiety, metaphor and intense visual tension. The stage space acted as a catalyst here - multiplying the emotions and visual ambiguity of each silhouette, making her not so much a model as an actress in a peculiar drama of split identity.
The collection's title - originally Split Personalities - could boldly give way to a more literary metaphor: Le Théâtre des Figures Fragmentées (Theater of Split Figures). For it is fragmentation - mental, physical, conceptual - that dominates each of Wun's sculptural forms. The surreal silhouettes did not resemble clothes in the classical sense. They told stories. The rounded, armored structures resembled sculptures from inside a nightmare - as if Balenciaga had met Hans Bellmer in a futuristic atelier. Every detail - the asymmetrical cape, the grotesquely curved collar, the ribbon wrapping around the face - was a clue in a fashion detective story whose ending could not be predicted.
Wun constructs fabric narratives the way a director guides the camera: a close-up on the texture, a long shot on the deformation of the silhouette, an abrupt cut between the softness of organza and the sharpness of latex. Instead of classic “glamour,” there is anxiety and tension - almost Lynchian in its atmosphere. Nothing is what it seems. The dresses resemble funeral veils and futuristic armor at the same time, and the color scheme - from deep blacks to dead, extinguished purples - builds a set worthy of an expressionist film. These forms are extremely inhuman, yet painfully intimate - as if the outer skin were a literal manifestation of emotional angst.
This is a show in which the silhouette is a carrier of emotions rather than a fashion figure. The Wuna woman is not a concrete figure - she is an archetype: transfigured by trauma, armed by experience, immersed in a theatrical staging of her own soul. The illusion of reality gives way to symbolism - piercings like scars, rifts like marks from an internal struggle. This fashion does not want to please - she wants to disturb. And she does it with ruthless precision.
Robert Wun proves once again that haute couture can (and should) be more than aesthetic bravado. In a world where the narrative is often just an accessory to the silhouette, he puts the narrative at the center. The form follows from the content. And the content? It's like a whisper from behind the curtain - incomprehensible, hypnotic, terrifyingly beautiful.
Photos courtesy of Robert Wun
No comments:
Post a Comment