Dress

Tom Ford’s recent designs suggest an atavistic Hellenism that resembles the costumes by Dionyssis Fotopoulos for the Michael Cacoyannis film Iphigenia. The gown shown here is seemingly shredded and pulled asunder, like the rent vestige of a garment. That Ford treated silk chiffon with such atypical roughness introduces a further sense of physical excess, even violence, to his design. Well-versed in contemporary art and architecture, he applied the deconstructivist strategy of exposing points of structural destabilization in this gown for Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. By doing so, he revealed the intrinsic components of the gown’s making: narrow cords like Grecian harnesses and bands of fabric draped rather than shaped by cutting to fit the contours of the body. Pictured on the cover of Time as the "Dress of the Year," Ford’s gown, reduced to narrow raw-edged bands of chiffon, established a new paradigm for the venerable House of Saint Laurent. Fashion’s classicism was shifted into a more elemental and primitivistic phase.