Summer prints contributed to the effusion of colour and graphic interest in the major trend shows, bringing hopeful verdicts on prospects for the Spring/Summer 2015 season. Fresh prints and floral colours set the scene.
Milano Unica showed the importance of botany, green glamour and nature with a positive gloss for fashion fabrics. Flower design ranged from small, wallpaper, ditzy images to large, splashy full-blown garden blooms – often meant to be used in panels or mixed with disparate elements, allowing free rein to the designer to make bespoke statements on fabrics made from high-quality fibres.
Florals ranged from photo images to minuscule Liberty prints.
There has been a great upsurge in depicting country pleasures, colours and ideas, with the green appeal of ramie, linen, cotton and cool wool for summer echoed in its decoration. Italian design guru Angelo Uslenghi cited Pope Francis as an inspiration: “His brand of simplicity is leading the fresh look at inspirational nature.”
As well as serenity, a word bandied about to describe the trend for watercolours and calm floral prints, there remains the appeal of the sparkling, with brighter, brasher colours featuring bubblegum shades, and a Schiaparelli pink thrown into the mix for fun. Gold exoticism, with an accompanying brown and coffee contrast, gave a disco, young look, which is particularly aimed at the growing Far East markets whose clientele are moving upmarket but still want glitzy, colourful clothes most-easily achieved by means of print, embellishment and shine.
New techniques seen in the shows included multidimensional origination, involving embroidering, dyeing and printing, with digital images just one of the multi-layers that are created for complex, high-value fabrics, which have the cachet of being different and visibly complex. Craft being one of the themes of the season, the multi-dimensional approach fitted in well.
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| Flower power - white grounds or black. Chintzy effects and watercolours |
Super-realist Japanese looks came in a Moda In trend-area design by Ciabatti, who showed a photographic cherry blossom on a cotton fabric, while at the other end of the spectrum Denertex had created a pale china-blue spray of flowers, printed intermittently on a white fabric with a spot weave.
Tiny flowers were interpreted in unrealistic colour combinations such as purples, yellows, greens and blues, as at Piave Mantex, and the small, detailed florals used by Tejidos Rebes came on a white ground like a stylised book of hours in a mediaeval manuscript.
Some of these effects were microscopic, so that they gave the feeling of texture, which was a feature of the summer trend. Very tightly packed images of botanically correct flowers produced a 3D effect, while large imaginary flowers in pinks and greens, favoured colours of the season, gave a nod to furnishings and large-scale canvases.
In Première Vision chintzy floral designs on white grounds appeared with a flourish in many collections, while black backgrounds produced a much more edgy look. There is a huge cross-over to home designs and it seems to have influenced the scale of some designers’ thinking with bolder, brighter statements used for fashion items too.
Watercolours and slightly smudged florals were applied to realistic images of individual blooms, whether roses, wisteria or other garden flowers. These were held up as works of art to put on large-scale fabric for dresses, jackets or summer coats. Bird drawings and simple, stylised flower shapes, outlined in black, had a more edgy look, based on popular 1980s graphics that are already being widely used for publicity material and cards.
Not everything was floral. There were geometrics and bold checks, stripes, dots, and mixtures of prismatic shapes, sometimes literally chopped up and reassembled for a modern-art aspect. Buildings and structural shapes were chosen, but the most notable were iconic faces like Marilyn Monroe, with modern-art references to Lichtenstein or Warhol.
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Truly digital - mixed techniques interpreted digitally for street art, Lichtenstein,
Warhol and graffiti inspiration |
Graffiti inspiration, which is basically tamed street art, continues to influence the fashion trend, with fabrics featuring real images or arty charcoal drawings, splashy neons or a mixture of different shapes and asymmetric patterns, often over-sprayed to look like a graffiti wall in a European city, with grey and black the major colours at play. Smaller, more-controlled images took the look upmarket for classic collections.
Shirt Avenue is the upmarket-dedicated area of Milano Unica. Fabric makers like Ratti, Leggiuno and Taiana used a variety of print techniques, increasingly digital, to suit their designs, which will be used in designer collections and as accessories in tailoring establishments worldwide, including Savile Row, for the traditional Jermyn Street effect.
What can be described as a refined ‘street look’ has been adopted in many of these areas, and it was interesting to see how images such as luggage labels, photos and words had been organised elegantly into regular patterning for superior shirtings in long staple cotton and up-market fibre combinations like linen/cotton, silk/cotton and sometimes precious fibres combined with viscose.
Digital imaging has enabled designers to mix surreal scenes for Summer 2015 with everyday or prosaic items of scientific apparatus – a test-tube for instance – juxtaposed with 18th Century busts or cornices or pediments of classic buildings, sometimes wreathed in romantic flowers, ivy or other Romantic-art icons and producing an element of surprise in the incongruity of the resulting designs. This sort of contrast was printed on flimsy materials – most destined for womenswear, dresses and blouses in cotton voile, nylon or silk, but also examined by menswear buyers.
Prints were chosen to illustrate the major trends selected by Milano Unica and in Première Vision. The wide variety of designs from a large number of countries and cultures showed the growing importance of digital imaging to fashion, both fast and designer. The examples are no longer assigned to a particular area, but are interspersed with other trends and methods of print. Designers showed the scope of mixing different images which has contributed to the verve and colour seen for the new season.