Ailanto Fall/Winter 2012-13

Hello, my dear friends!

Wow, it truly feels as though I'd been abducted by aliens... :D School is so intense lately! I barely have time to breathe, let alone sleep... But what we do is truly awesome.

I'm in 2nd year of a BA Honours in Fashion Design, which means that things are getting serious. When I first came to the school I didn't know anything about anything, and that's what our 1st year was for: familiarizing ourselves with things like Patternmaking, Dressmaking, Moodboards, Photoshop, Illustrator, Screen Printing, and endless etcs. But this year, and after having absorbed all of this, we are putting it all to practice, and saying it's been a stimulating experience would be nothing short of an understatement.

We're asked to design several collections at once, along with a lot of side projects that make us experiment with everything: we play with shapes onto a dummy, we make fabric manipulations, we explore the tools that softwares like Photoshop and Illustrator put within our reach... We push, in short, our creativity (and stress-management skills) to the very limit and try to meet the deadlines we've to face very regularly as best we can.

I probably should be working on one of those scarily long projects right now, but the truth is that blogging does me a great deal of good, and I have something in my possession I should have shared with the cyber-world a couple of weeks ago already.

So. Fashion Week quietly came to Barcelona and left as noiselessly, at least for me. As you may imagine, if I was barely sleeping 3 hours a night, there was no way I could dig myself free of the hole I was trapped into and go to The Brandery, a few 080 shows I'd been invited to, and just be merry. So I stayed home, was a good girl, and worked my *** off to meet the deadlines.

But. The following week, the day after this deadline, in fact, was another event I'd had the amazing luck to be invited to, and which I just couldn't discard as indifferently.

The amazingly talented Muñoz brothers, designers of the Spanish brand Ailanto, whom I had occasion to meet a while ago (remember here?), were kind enough as to invite me to their show during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Madrid (what used to be Cibeles). And I, strangely enough, couldn't help taking a few pictures... ;)

They were inspired by the Chinoiserie art movement, and the fascination that 19th century Europe held for everything Oriental. So it's basically Orient, as seen by the 19th century european, as seen by Ailanto. And oh my, what a collection... See for yourselves:

The prints are part of Ailanto's signature, and I'm absolutely in love with the way they've incorporated oriental motifs with metallic and pearly touches.

The cut, fit and drape of the garments is absolutely flawless, and the iridescent colours absolutely other-worldly.

This was my first show with the new camera, so here you saw only a portion of the whole, you can find better pics of the show here.

So anyway! I hope you enjoyed this collection as much as I did, and that you have an amazing week!

On top of everything else, I'm in the middle of a Traditional Embroidery workshop, so I can't wait to show you what we're doing... ;)

Be safe!

 

[All content & photos are by me unless specified otherwise. I'm happy if you decide to copy and keep them in your computer as reference, or post them in your blog or anywhere you want. But you MUST put my name or a link to the blog somewhere, saying where you took them from. Not putting anything is in my opinion almost as bad as saying you took them yourself.]