Mary Katrantzou dived into the world of Walt Disney’s Fantasia—his 1940 surreal cartoon animation film—while she was designing her Fall collection. The spectacular oceans of moving color and pattern must have seemed like a natural habitat for a designer who has made so much of manipulating prints in the computer age. Still, with Katrantzou, following one strand is never enough. Possibly it was the date of the Disney release that made her also start working up silhouettes influenced by ’40s film noir, big shoulders, furs, and checked tweed suiting. Katrantzou is culturally connected. For her show at Tate Modern, she had the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra tucked away in a corner playing live.
In any event, this collection could have used more color, more exuberance, more of Katrantzou’s former downright creative weirdness to carry the occasion. Approval for things comes in waves. After her explosively innovative beginnings as the first designer to elevate digital print to an art form, Katrantzou swiftly backed away when the mass market began exploiting it. Since then, she’s been repositioning herself as a designer who decorates surfaces and does tailoring, too. In this collection, there were prints and beaded embroideries inspired by Fantasia’s soundwaves, bugle beads and whirring buttons sewn in grids on sugary pastel coats, and cartoony landscapes in which the Little Mermaid and the Little Centaur popped up.
Yet counterintuitively this feels like a time when the eye, even the soul, longs for a bit of out-there madness and daring from fashion. Katrantzou has her commercial bases covered by now; she has proven she can be wearable. Now that she doesn’t have to think so much about pleasing customers with her every look, it would be great to see her get back to giving the world some of the arty, print-y, astonishing showpieces that blew people’s minds in the first place.
