Narrative Design

NARRATIVE STORY FROM STYLE.COM
SEPTEMBER 20, 2009LONDON

By Sarah Mower

Luella Bartley's girl has calmed down and smartened up for Spring. Where for the past few seasons every dress had been multicolored, flower-printed, beribboned, buckled, or frilled up in various pop-ironic ways, for this outing her clothes have become almost straightforward, in a mid-sixties Sunday-best sort of way. Stripping away the teeny, cutesy haberdashery of the collection had the effect of focusing attention on silhouettes: princess coats with Peter Pan collars, pannier dresses with padded hips, and various other devices lifted from the Balenciaga era Great Granny knew so well. If it hadn't been for the fact that Bartley's color palette was bright and cheerful—lemon, lipstick red, teal, camel, and sugar pink—and all the shapes were cut short and given a girlish raised waist, it could have been an uncharacteristically sober affair for a designer who's made her name by supplying a hearty dose of cheek to runway proceedings. As it was, without the surface froufrou (excepting the tulle-frilled dress and skirt), the collection looked well made and set fair to compete on the same kind of ground as Marc by Marc Jacobs—although these clothes are going to read as several degrees more dressed up and formal than Bartley's usual offerings.

From reading and analysing the narrative for this collection of Luella Bartley's, I can tell that the Spring 2010 collection was based broadly on the typical mid-sixties look, and the Balgenciagra era.

NARRATIVE STORY FROM STYLE.COM
JUNE 28, 2012PARIS

By Matthew Schneier

The sailor is a house icon at Jean Paul Gaultier. There seems to be no limit to the number of times the designer will go back to that well. The twist for Spring is that our hero, the marinière, has traveled to India. That is to say, he wears the seafaring garb that is his standard and classic—the buttoned panel sailor's trousers in denim, the Breton stripes, the cape-back tops—but many pieces bear the influence of Indian craftwork. Those Breton stripes are picked out in a scattering thicket of beads. The sailor's tattoos (anchor, siren, so on) are embroidered onto shirtsleeves and fronts. A toile de Jouy, meanwhile, featured scenes from sailorly life, including le mâlefrom the ads for the JPG cologne Le Male. It may be a lot of Gaultieriana if you're not already a Gaultierite.

From reading and analysing the narrative for this collection of Jean Paul Gaultier's, I can tell that the Spring 2012 collection was broadly based on the typical sailor style, with a twist of Indian culture.

NARRATIVE STORY FROM STYLE.COM
SEPTEMBER 29, 2012PARIS

By Tim Blanks

The British Embassy, with its rooms full of nineteenth-century furniture and walls hung with twenty-first-century art, was a perfect backdrop for Vivienne Westwood, who has often fused past and future to great effect over the course of her four decades in fashion. Of late, however, her interest in the future has had more to do with the issue of climate change. Today's show, for instance, was called Climate Revolution. Westwood insisted the title actually had nothing to do with the collection, but there was an unfinished quality to the clothes that you could read as an anarchic delight in dystopian rawness—if you were inclined, that is, to the designer's apocalyptic train of thought.

From reading and analysing the narrative for this collection of Vivienne Westwood's, I can tell that the collection was broadly based on the British Embassy, with a twist on things to support climate change.