Altered states

Designers have long been seduced by the transformative power of fashion, and this season saw the creation of fresh new silhouettes as they explored construction, fantasy and form

- JACK MOSS

It was hard to miss the enormous golden dressmaker’s pin on the penultimate runway look of Jonathan Anderson’s latest womenswear collection for Loewe. Skewered through an ecru gown – itself appearing like an unravelling roll of fabric – it was as if it was holding its folded form in place.

Earlier in the show, pins were also seen perforating the waistband of leather shorts, and they had made an appearance in Anderson’s menswear collection, shown a few months prior, piercing through brocade tops. They were meant to evoke the small samples of fabric tacked on a board before a garment has even been created. In the womenswear collection, the designer said he imagined them jumping off the wall and on to the body. ‘If you take out the pin, does it fall down?’ he said after the show. ‘There’s something seductive in that.’

The pin is a tool of transformation. The dressmaker can use it to wield power over a piece of fabric. It is an act of sculpting, intuitive and instant, without the need to whittle away at marble, stone, wood or metal. Neolithic man would use pins of wood, bone or thorn to hold skins and furs to the body, while in Roman times, gold and silver pins created the draped forms of antiquity, piercing through the cloth of a toga.

They say that to understand a garment, you must turn it inside out. When curators were working on the 2014 retrospective of 20th-century American couturier Charles James at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, they said it was like undertaking an archaeologist’s excavation. Underneath the perfectly draped and cinched exterior fineries of James’ garments were intricate layers of underwire, whale bone and buckram cotton, all crammed together in an attempt by the designer to reshape the female form.