On each of the seats at their Spring/Summer 2017 runway, Céline took care to deposit a quotation from American artist Dan Graham: “I want to show that our bodies are bound to the world whether we like it or not.” From one artist to another, Phoebe Philo seems to have wanted to show that fashion is a mere dialogue with the entire artistic sphere, especially with reality – far from being cut off from the universe that she never ceases to extract each and every grain of creativity from. For the current season Céline is offering an immaculately white piece that’s almost altered upon contact with Klein’s “Anthropométries”.
A piece as dreamy as this is rare. Just like Klein’s process in the early 60s, when the artist demanded nude models painted his blue to make their bodily mark on white paper. The genesis of this captivating blue is itself rooted in the memory of a sweet daydream: “In 1946, I was 18 years old. That day, while I was lying down in a plaza in Nice, I began to feel hatred for the birds flying here and there in my beautiful cloudless blue sky, because they were trying to leave marks in the greatest and most beautiful of my artworks.”
Now it’s on an almost translucent dress that this ever-so-sought after blue is deposed. A woman full of attitude who seems to admire and take pleasure in the impact provoked by this opposition of colors – one as natural as the other that responds to a complicated chemical process. Imperceptibly, Phoebe Philo introduces a new notion of glamour composed like a subtle hybridization of insolent sophistication, sensual comfort, and artistic rigor. Draped and fluid, the piece promises to enter into legend, just like the Mondrian dress by a certain Yves Saint Laurent.
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