“The shadows that live under beauty enable the light to shine more brightly.”
We seek balance and the essence of beauty, but nowadays, these balances cannot be found and, for some time now, there is more interest in researching the reality of a meaningless, chaotic, fragmentary world which is maintained thanks to the need for idealized beauty.
The aim of the search for beauty may not be to flatter the senses but to reflect on extreme situations. There is always a point beyond the beautiful and the sublime, and that point is where the spectator witnesses first-hand the demystification of the beautiful, a reinterpretation of a new order that seeks the complicity of irony and tragedy. And it is precisely that which injects new energy so that the tiresomeness of the most classical concepts of beauty can be left behind.
There are schools of thought that believe that the limit of perfect beauty can be found in the dark and sinister; sinister meaning a condition needed to produce an aesthetic effect. However, in order to achieve this effect, the dark must remain hidden, as its disclosure would produce the destruction of such effect.
We find the beauty of the sublime just one step before the terrible; a step which envelops and captivates in the extreme and which hides that which we know but do not wish to see. This is the composition that allows us to find the perfect balance and the meaning of such fascination.
I always think that one of the primary objectives of fashion is to recreate beauty and, on the way to achieving this, I discover that there are always things that can be appreciated and used in the places where I didn’t want to look.
It is an attraction to the abysm and hidden fascination for imperfection.
An image from Lynch’s films comes to mind continuously while I work on this collection; it is the beginning of Blue Velvet when the camera first captures a perfect universe to then delve into the subsoil and visit the hell of the imperfect, grotesque and surreal, showing an entire world of insignificant, small beings feeding on and seizing so much beauty.
Silhouettes
“Under Beauty” is a collection with a soft beginning which increases little by little until something explodes, revealing that which lies beyond the “beautiful”; a universe invaded by small beings that feed on idyllic flowers and it is at this point when the prints being to co-exist with each other in an ongoing combination until the insects devour and break up the flowers and they become lost in the nothingness of a vacuum.
This play on appearances is also conveyed through strict patterns and sober, all-encompassing volumes. High-quality tailoring is present throughout the entire collection and, as occurs with the prints, hidden, unexpected details gradually appear, such as false lapels and elements that break the “perfection” creating subtle asymmetries.
A special reinterpretation of the idyllic Liberty print affords another dimension to the colour block, giving it great strength and fresh vision.
See the collection.
Photos & text Copyright Ana Locking.