THIS is feel-good chic.
Yvonne Quisumbing, an artist who can cross over between visual painting and fashion designing, comes bearing gifts.
The clothes this month is a panoply of delight — lashing of sparkles, beads, and rich patterns.
She develops her own brand of silhouette by combining structural form with fluid movements.
After paring things back and stripping looks down to their essentials all year, we’re almost giddy for more embellishments, more color, more play. And although we know we might sound like a kid, we’ll say it anyway: Still, only Scrooge could be a minimalist in 2018.
Helmets made of floral cutouts invigorate the scheme. Skewing the seductive appeal of the clothes were giant hats and black roses in full bloom, the flamboyance of which was tempered, in turn, by the sensibly flat shoes and incongruous onesies worn with some of the looks.
The majority of the collection was made in a monochrome palette of white, black, and pearly grays — as if it is created by adding calligraphy ink to
the fabric dye.
As the creative direction progressed, texture and color were added via splatter patterns and floral prints.
It was left to the printed finale pieces, replicating the lead-paned windows of medieval churches, to illuminate the title we imagined in our minds for her: “Ink Dye, Stained Glass.”
Her original hallmarks are present right here — the asymmetrical, folded, and overlapping panels; the sense of the waist; suspended necklines; the externalized seams — but the aesthetics, save for a couple of tight-skirted silhouettes, has long been with a more flow.
Ladies who opt for Quisumbing’s style strategy will be able to rifle through all that’s offered here, feel the textures and the silks, appraise the shapes. She translates as a fling. But how to understand it? Hers isn’t the obvious ooh-la-la type of beckoning, but something more grown-up and not too try-hard or sexiness in a modernist flesh. These are much less rigidly formal times, but the Yvonne Quisumbing wardrobe is still a refuge for women who want to retain a sophisticated front.