At a time where people are becoming more individual and when fashion is adopting a contrary idea of similarity in its collections in the all-powerful West, devoted to creating a homogenous style, the return of something a bit more heraldic is like a call to arms to return to one’s identity, to one’s origins, and to never again turn towards a fantasy vision of self or a recomposition of fundamental being. Fashion is now waiting for you to release your own identity, to offer the world a projection of your being, and to paradoxically use it as protection for your stripped down self.
The history of the coat of arms reveals that it was considered as a sort of signature in the Middle Ages, where it finds its origins. Indeed, the warfaring people of those days saw the problem of authenticity accentuated with the arrival of a heavier and more complete set of military armor. Men, rendered anonymous by their great iron masks, had trouble identifying the enemy in the cacophony of the battlefield. It was thus urgent to create a system to avoid a hazardous mishap during these bloody encounters. Heraldry appeared with its own visual grammar composed of geometric elements with a simple color palette on the shields of the combatants. Little by little, the crest would appear in everyday society, giving the identity of its bearer through these symbols as well as his patrimony, and thus becoming a judicial guarantor, notably during the first Crusades. At its height in the 13th and 14th centuries, the code of conduct surrounding coats of arms spread out into more complex forms. Flora, fauna, and imaginary creatures would soon be linked to individuals, professions, villages, and civil and religious communities.
Through the centuries, the coat of arms became a symbol of belonging to the aristocracy or a well-off bourgeois class, leaving commoners to use them only in Anglo-Saxon universities for the most part. And yet, for the last few seasons, these heraldic symbols have been making a discreet comeback in Olympia Le Tan’s creations for Kitsuné: a hand-embroidered fox released in a number of shapes and colors. Raf Simons also uses the effect for Dior on his dresses, sweaters, and the tailleur Bar in his Spring/Summer 2014 collection with houndstooth prints, giving Dior the first of having an armory that becomes a decorative element. Mary Katrantzou brings this ball to a marvelous close with the symbols from her Fall/Winter 2014-2015 collection. The coat of arms is no longer an object added to a primary material as a final touch, rather, she turns it into the primary material itself, playing with embroidery and this season leaving behind the digital prints and complex volumes that made her famous. The expansion of her creations’ graphic chart is carefully hashed out. You can make out a mixture of road signs, feudal armories, and professional organizational charts assembled in a rigorously symmetrical composition. Worn as protection, a suit for the contemporary female warrior at the crossroads of imagination and the past, the Katrantzou woman is set to offer the world all the obsolete softness of the Middle Ages magnified by the presence of a combative modernity.
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