Fine & Dandy

From Versailles to Victoriana to velvet slippers, the season’s moodboard is a riotous grand tour of sartorial extravagance. Divya Bala traces the lineage of the look through some of fashion’s most eccentric icons

J’adore colour! Prints! Textures!” declares stylist Catherine Baba. “One must never shy from letting go and embracing timeless opulence.” The Paris-based Australian, known as much for her wonderfully flamboyant style as for her consulting work with Chanel, Balmain and Givenchy, is not the only one; it seems the entire fashion industry keyed into her sartorial frequency in all of its piled-on, bower bird-esque, beau monde glory during the A/W 2016 shows.

A far cry from the bare bones of minimalism and the purposefully unremarkable normcore trend of recent times, this new mood builds on the momentum of maximalism, inspired by the sometimes eccentric style whims of high society. Most notably championed by Alessandro Michele at Gucci, the mood dips into the oft-mined creative deposit of past and present aristocracy and the cavalier, over-the-top approach to dress by an elite few. Case in point: his Medici-meets-Studio 54 A/W 2016 show, which was a chic calamity of rich brocades, jacquards, capes frothing with ruffles and baroque prints that looked like they’d been peeled from the walls of Palazzo Madama — all laced with a flourish of glam-rock sequins, disco hair and unexpectedly bookish glasses.