Area [1] always gets us excited for sparkling dresses that celebrate showing skin with confidence. For the New York brand's first couture show, designers Beckett Fogg and Piotrek Panszczyk tapped trailblazer Precious Lee [2] and catwalk favourite Yasmin Wijnaldum to model a body-positive, 14-look collection that can be described as sexy, fantasy couture.
"Haute Couture originally started in Paris in 1858 but looking deeper into history and tracing back to ancient civilizations, there has always been a deep connection and appreciation for craft and beauty," Fogg and Panszczyk said in a press statement. "It's like Haute Couture has been ingrained into our souls culturally expressed in different ways. Whether it be for religious purposes, or simply the innate need to create something beautiful."
"With this Couture collection we want to showcase our ability and dedication to creating beauty by hand. Every look in this collection has been developed over an extensive time of 6 months, and has been an ongoing collaboration between our studio in New York and our embroidery partners in India/globally. We are proud of all the hands that [were] involved in creating every single look, craft truly comes to fruition through a collaborative community and passion."
Area couture spring/summer 2021 features the brand's signature Swarovski-crystal-covered dresses and coordinated sets with more avant-garde silhouettes like accordion gowns, intricately crafted crochet designs, and layered paillettes made of silk organza. The collection was inspired by body-adornment rituals of ancient civilizations and the idea of couture being something that comes instinctively and intuitively to us as creative beings.
Ahead, take a closer look at the collection and the inspiration behind specific designs.
"We started creating our own coin motifs by cutting thousands of tags in organza that were all individually finished by hand with a graphic line of crystal," Fogg and Panszczyk said. "These tags then get sewn into graphic repeats creating soft, fluffy and relaxed gowns and long hair pieces cascading in graphic strands. To juxtapose this softness, we created sharp tailoring that's hand encrusted with hundreds of metal tags that demand attention through shine and the sound of the metal dancing on top of each other."
"For these pieces we were looking at South African Ndebele woman which have a rich history of personal adornments and their expression through arts and crafts," Fogg and Panszczyk said. "We started creating body conscious dresses like ribcages that swirled around the body, contouring shapes. For colour we wanted to create a painterly ombre effect, this was especially complicated because of the swirled shapes of the panels."
"We started experimenting with knit and crochet in our RTW and our crystal cup chain dresses and capes are usually inspired by traditional crochet," Fogg and Panszczyk said. "For our inaugural couture collection, we wanted to take it to the next level and combine our signature cup chain crystal with crochet. We plated hundreds of yards of crystal in yarn and crocheted cups inserted with large gems and crafted it all into a netted cape releasing in soft fringe. A panier dress is created by crocheting hundreds of yards of crocheted cup chain to a hoop creating a soft cage of crochet crystal and fringe."
"We wanted to create liquid-like looks by fusing a range of rich colors like sun, fuchsia, aqua, going into crystal clear and back into color, the drapes follow the body elegantly and start opening up around the hips and cascade into fringe," Fogg and Panszczyk said.
"This was our tribute to Grand Couture," Fogg and Panszczyk said. "We wanted to showcase our technical pattern skills by creating sculptured accordion dresses that were slashed on the side revealing the body, playing on the idea of the cake gown."
