Symmetry sits so easily upon the eye. It is straightforward to process. We find it attractive. Two identical halves suggest a balanced, binary, mirror-imaged whole: perfect. Balance was the objective of this Uma Wang collection, however the equilibrium she sought was of a kind that more truly and interestingly reflects the imperfect nature of experience.
Backstage at the Temple du Saint-Esprit, Wang said her starting point was the work of Alexander Calder, whose sculptural mobiles achieved balance by constructing non-symmetrical equilibrium between their myriad of unequal parts. Achieving its equivalent in garments, Wang said, involved making “mistakes.”
“I don’t want the normal way, the traditional way to cut,” Wang added. “We prototype on the body, then take it off to see how everything is. There are so many mistakes. For example, the bottom should go this way, but we go that way.”
Going in directions you conventionally shouldn’t will result in outcomes you conventionally couldn’t anticipate. Here jacket backs extended into silk trains; sleeves appeared to have been pulled away from their bodies; a skirt and trousers were collapsed into a single garment; and trouser legs were knotted, fastened or allowed to remain open. Panels slipped out from seams or hung where they did not conventionally belong. A low box pleat opened the back of one jacket; bags came wrapped in shrouds of fabric that matched the garments they were worn with.
Wang customarily uses natural dyes, including tea, to color her fabrics. This season that practice led to irregular smudges of patination consistent with the collection’s agenda of resolved displacement. The same principle governed her choice of materials. “If everything is jacquard, it’s too full, too rich,” she said. “So I wanted to block the mood with some poor fabric, not really rich.” Dense mossy brown jacquards were set against washed, papery muslin and linen. A shiny chiffon trench the crackly green of seaweed paper contrasted with the liquid matteness of a dense viscose worn beneath it. The visual structure of a herringbone wool endured the surface subsidence imposed upon it by garment-dyeing.
The earrings, bracelets, and toe posts on wedged sandals were crafted in Calder-reminiscent metal shapes, sometimes with wires that echoed his mobiles. Perhaps the latticed leather of the colored slides first triggered this association, but the collection’s process of worked disorder sometimes seemed akin to the approach of Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, albeit applied through a different philosophy of craft and broadcast at a more serene frequency. You could certainly see the art-fair habitués appreciating both schools of carefully wrought wearable shape and texture. This was a collection with equipoise.
