PARIS—The French capital's 9-day-long, ready-to-wear extravaganza kicked off on a conceptual note Tuesday with a high-minded spring-summer 2011 show by emerging label Aganovich, which channeled such disparate influences as withered poppies, jigsaw puzzles and shipbuilding.
Models sported outfits that were like half-put-together puzzles, with cutout bolero jacket tops layered over half of a pleated schoolgirl skirt. The idea, the label's design duo explained, was to create a collection made up of mix and match-able parts.
"We don't want to be 'conceptual designers' that make a few 'difficult' pieces for the catwalk and then churn out hundreds of T-shirts," said Brooke Taylor, who serves as a sort of muse and intellectual guide to Serbian-born designer Nana Aganovich.
The duo earned their stripes with a display that could only be described as nontraditional: Models paraded around an oversized rusted anchor reported to have been brought from Holland specially for the occasion, as water poured down on their heads from spigots overhead.
About a dozen other outfits were displayed on wooden mannequins set into the windows of the courtyard where the show was held, as a soundtrack of bubbly, undersea sounds echoed overhead. Lovely looks included a tunic dress in cream-colored silk with red and purple streaks streaming down from the neckline -- a print culled from photographer Irving Penn's images of withered poppies, the designers said.
"The poppy led to the idea of opium, heroine, a liquid dream, water, femininity, and the anchor was there to give it some solidity," said Taylor. "But maybe it only makes sense in our heads."
In an era dominated by mega-productions, where the luxury supernovas stage lavish displays that come off without a hitch, inside Aganovich's quirky head was a novel place to start Paris fashion week.
Waiting for Twitter to feed in the latest...