Sea Therapy

Photos Courtesy of Style.com

It is the calm after the thunderstorm.

Fashion spent a 2010 Fall/Winter season worshiping Balmain’s party-girl aesthetic with studded handbags, navy sequined cropped jackets, body-con dresses and strappy four-inch gladiator heels that soared above the ground. Men and women raged the nightclub scene in disco colours like fuschia, orange, and purple. Nars’s Schiap nail polish was a popular choice, named after surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Sweaters with broad, beaded shoulders and marching band jackets were a salute to the King of Pop’s death.

One fashion year later, that memory is bittersweet. Michael Jackson hits no longer tremble through the speakers in stores. I recently heard a salesgirl chat so loudly with another about her weekend plans that she drowned out a faintly played, radio station tribute of “The Girl is Mine”.

After the rain comes sun, and the summer heat is like a Sunday morning hangover. On the dog days of summer where it’s over 37 degrees Celcius, I can only think of one thing to cool me down, and that’s to be on the water. Quite frankly, the beach wouldn’t be the right cure to those throbbing UV rays, especially with the effects of global warming strutting before the melted eyeshadow on our eyes. Instead of transporting us to tropical island excursions this season, several new designers have taken inspiration from boating trips and sailing voyages for their Resort 2011 and Spring/Summer collections. Being on a sailboat is much cooler anyways.

For some designers, sailing voyages remind them of impressionist artists who took their rowboats into nature and painted abstract flowers. In the impressionist art movement, spontaneity was the drive, and the blurring between lines was an important element that exemplified the feminine and romantic spirit of those days. On the runway, small, multicoloured florals were the predominant print of the season. The floral prints look less Renaissance and more Impressionist in their execution - less Italian and more French in their cultural references. Dresses, blouses, pants, shorts, sailor shorts, scarves, jackets and everything you can possibly imagine down to the ankle socks on your feet were printed in small abstract flowers. Some flowers even bled into the colours of others. These new textile designers give Monet a run for his money. Cacharel and Balenciaga even styled separates together in head-to-toe floral prints, making it hard for the eye to differentiate where the blouse ends and the pant waistband begins. At Jason Wu, long bias-cut dresses with ruffles were given a further Parisian touch with confectionery colours.

Left to Right: Cacharel Resort 2011, Balenciaga Resort 2011, Jason Wu Resort 2011, Jill Stuart Resort 2011 - Courtesy of Style.com

And while florals are not a new Spring trend we haven’t seen before, their enthusiastic whimsy this season are made current by designers blurring the boundaries between the feminine and masculine. The femininity of the printed frocks is juxtaposed with dandy, masculine elements and southern garcon flair, seen through finishing details and accessories. The straw porkpie hat is a popular fashion accessory on the runway, with references to gender pushing artists such as Mary Cassatt, or in the case of the Dior men’s show, Buster Keaton. For women, neck bows and French jabots are worn with tailored men’s shirts or military cargo jackets; tight tops are paired with slouchy pants; exaggerated glasses balance serious shifts; gingham plaid patterns turn up in chain handbags; and high-waisted ankle pants come in waist-to-toe flower prints. I can see the girls on the street pairing these pants with Sperry top-sider boat shoes.

Even men have adopted a creative outlet through their appearance as much as women. Cream coloured suits were splattered with watercolor flower motifs at Kenzo; Lanvin creates a men’s embossed brocade suit; John Galliano has a Degas moment, putting his male models in satin ballet point shoes with jute soles.

Left to right: John Galliano S/S 2011, Kenzo S/S 2011, Lanvin Homme S/S 2011 - Courtesy of Style.com

In some cases, the soft, romantic boating motifs for summer were contrasted by mod silhouettes in Technicolor and nautical brass accessories, as if taken straight out of the Godard classic Pierrot Le Fou, set in the Mediterranean Sea. Junya Watanabe’s Men’s show had jackets in all the primary colors taken straight out of  Jean-Paul Belmondo’s closet. Jil Sander did an entire collection of solid neon basics. Men exposed their ankles in flood pants by rolling up the hems, which proves to be a recession-proof technique that avoids taking your slacks to the tailor. Marc Jacob’s women’s Resort collection was also quirky, whimsical and nautical at the same time. Retro colour-blocked dresses and exaggerated straw boaters reminded me of Anna Karina’s baby blue sweaters and bright red dresses. Prada went overboard in Technicolor accessories, which ranged from ankle socks in fun colors to bracelets that reminded me of the stacked ring toys I used to play with when I was a kid.

Left to Right: Junya Watanabe S/S 2011, Marc Jacobs Resort 2011, Jil Sander S/S 2011, Prada Resort 2011 - Courtesy of Style.com

How is it that fashion has taken inspiration from such opposite eras of our timeline? Although it’s hard to dissect how Renoir’s “Dejuner-Canotiers/The Boating Party” could be reincarnated on the runway, or how designers figure that women and men want to buy clothes that pay tribute to New Wave French cinema, both ideas seem to merge together this season to form the perfect outfits for a summer voyage.

I recently went to a public park screening of Godard’s A Woman is a Woman in the Lower East Side of New York. It was my friend Isabel’s idea -- even if the movie was still trippy after two glasses of wine, we could at least take pleasure in the colours, the costumes, and the art direction. There were hundreds of young neighbourhood intellectuals and artsy fartsies there that night, absorbing the artistic inspiration from this period, while smirking at the crappy, confusing dialogue. They probably would have done just the same in the sixties. The experience was retro, but still fresh.

Perhaps it has to do with the resurgence of existentialism in the air, and that dressing in this eclectic manner is an expression of freedom to live one’s life as passionately as possible. Maybe it’s an ironic commentary on the social divides created by commercial mass market corporations -- screw the gender rules created by the patriarchal society, I want to wear FLOWERS! Maybe women and men just prefer to wear clothes where they don’t have to take themselves too seriously, especially on vacation. Whatever it all means, the beauty of summer is knowing that any day is an opportune moment for an expedition, and a sailing one at that. After a hard year of being bombarded with work, school, papers, numbers, and bills to name a few, it’s nice to relax and play, no?