A smorgasbord of silhouettes combining ’80s trousers and inner tube sleeves, tapestry leather masks, panther and camouflage, bowl hats (among the finest designed at the time by Stephen Jones), handbags with legs, coats with porthole loops that recall, in a fluorescent clash, the space flights of Pierre Cardin in the era of survivalism.
Walter Van Beireindonck's strength lies in the way he plays with all the codes, the whole military wardrobe, which he hijacks with the verve of a comic strip artist and the mastery of a Flemish cutting master. The poetry is there, escaping from a poppy feather chapka over a khaki woolen bonnet unearthed from a couture overstock, a jacket with quilted crab claws. “It's like automatic writing,” says the man whose knitwear is in itself a knitted painting. “Finding beauty, even in chaos” is the mantra of a particularly inspired Walter Van Beirendonck: “I played a Frankensteinian art game with my own mind… I found new holes and loops, and hooked in tubes to the deeply Belgian DNA of surrealism.” Says fashion's answer to Magritte: “Freedom is the possibility of being, not the obligation to be.”
Hats off!
