Tuesday, June 18, 2019

BEAUTY: Clothing--Palomo Spain

Final stretch. Paris.

Alejandro Gómez Palomo's eponymous label Palomo Spain showed a jaw-dropping Spring Summer '20 collection at Paris Fashion Week that is sure to push buttons...like he has been doing for a few years now.

Palomo has become known as a designer who blurs the sartorial line between genders. And his feminizing of men's garments and of the male silhouette couldn't be timelier with both Xander Zhou and Per Götesson showing collections at London Fashion Week that featured only skirts (here) or the unraveling of masculine stereotypes (here). It is a common occurrence now for designers to include some kind of softer, more flowing item into a collection, whether it might be a wide cut culotte that looks like a skirt, an actual skirt, a caftan, a wrap, or even what might be identified as a dress.

But Palomo takes it to a logical conclusion and creates collections that look as if they were lifted directly off a runway for Women's Fashion Week. Inspiration for this collection that includes corsetry and dresses came not only from Palomo's native Spain (notice the crocheted fringe and the traditional lace-work panels) but from Pompeii. Palomo says he referenced "a new civilization of guys rising from the ashes of Pompeii. They are facing the future, and the future is ugly. It’s plastic, it’s polluted, it’s sabotaged—and it’s rave, it’s sex, and all that." But among the ruins is a sense of purity, of gentleness, of a lyric beauty. Not every man is going to want to wear Palomo's creations, and to more than a few it will make no sense (and that is okay, change does not come all at once), but I am supremely glad he is creating what he is and manifesting a new space for expression and thought. That in itself is power. Saleability is secondary.


https://www.palomospain.com/

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