DORHOUT MEES – Spring/Summer 2017

DORHOUT MEES - Spring/Summer 2017

October 8, 2016

By Lynn Quanjel

Photos Courtesy of Dorhout Mees

Paris, France – For the second consecutive season Dorhout Mees has elected to show her new collection on the official calendar during the fashion week in Paris. For her Spring/Summer 2017 collection (incidentally titled ‘Orphic’), the designer explains that she got inspired by the striking of lightning in nature. The result is a storytelling collection about the striking of lighting in nature, as well as the human body.

“The combination of that much danger and beauty combined is a beautiful contradiction” the designer explains. “This contradiction, in combination with the fragility of the human body, was such an interesting thought that it created my complete collection”.

Dorhout Mees isn’t following any of the trends that are coming up next Spring/Summer. She is telling her own story. And that is totally cool if you ask us.The collection is a beautifully dramatic and theatrical art, which consists out of many corsets, silk, high waisted trousers, cutouts, puffed sleeves and other sculptural shapes.

Dorhout Mees went on to explain on her inspiration. “The movement of light, heat and electricity is such a concentrated shape through matter and through the body. Heat can change a tree into coal, electricity can change metals into beautiful oily oxidized surfaces, lightning creates scars on the body that look as if it froze onto it.”

This natural violence inspired by the conduction of electricity translates into prints. They also reference scars on the skin, as illustrated as tattoos. The materials are processed by hand in order to create structures that remind us to the irregularities of scars.

The colors used throughout the collection are rather elegant. They range from crispy white to pastels such as pink, green, beige and blue. The only stronger color used is a deep shade of burgundy red, which radiates a sense of luxurious drama.