OP ART: TRIPPING FASHION
In fashion, as in real life, there’s ups and downs, there’s happy and sad, there is dark and there is light. As for the last fashion month, one could pick out Valentino’s Paris show to make a point here. There were a bunch of dead animals tingling and tangling down one model’s shoulders, but there also were world’s freshest male models Derek and Hansel. What really caught our attention though was that there was a lot of black and white. And if we’ve learnt one thing from excessive consumption of Disney and Hollywood productions, that would be that extremes really only make sense in relation to one another. It’s about combining and arranging them in their purest, mixing them to contrast and compliment each other, to create something (visually) mind-blowing. And that’s where Op art, the queen art discipline in visually challenging eyes and mind, comes in. Mostly associated with the trippy Sixties, an example of Op (as in optical), art can be found way back in 1938 in Victor Vasarely’s piece Zebras (that’s the one at the very top of the page). Nonetheless, fashion-wise this art form definitely is located in the Sixties, a decade of prints, patterns and optical illusions, not only in black and white, but in all kinds of lovely colors. Seeing through the shows of Bottega Venetta, Dior and Emilio Pucci we can definitely detect a revival of this flashy trend and we love it! After making sure we didn’t get caught in a time warp and aren’t tripping, we put together a set of our favorites to show them to all of you, our sisters and brothers, because we love you too. Peace!
Karen Walker style.com
By Katharina Nöstlinger