Entitled ‘Belle de Jour’, after Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film that featured actress Catherine Deneuve interpreting an ingénue discovering the ways of the world, Fyodor Golan’s Autumn/Winter 2013 womenswear collection, shown in the lavish ballrooms of London’s Savoy Hotel, explored the transition between adolescence and womanhood. Wim Delvoye’s sculptures, with their seemingly contradictory scales and proportions that are resolved in the final perception of each piece, and J.S. Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ painting, also inspired the states of personal evolution leading to feminine confidence and maturity explored by fashion designers Fyodor Podgorny and Golan Frydman.
States of childhood and playfulness were evident in the details of traditionally youthful and voluminous sartorial garments such as girly A-line skirts, oversized pleat detailing, or in the iconic Smiley faces embossed on black leather pencil skirts and jackets. In contrast, silhouettes were made narrower and sophisticated by resorting to sumptuous fabrics (some of which produced by luxury mills Piacenza and Saydam) such as silk blends, crape organza, cashmere and leather in a palette of black, burnt orange, carmine and bronzed mango. Finally, the transition into mature womanhood was illustrated through sartorial details such as layering of delicate silks and gauzy chiffons, gentle ruffles around necklines, hand-drawn prints and rich three-dimensional embroideries.
Podgorny and Frydman trained in womenswear at the Istituto Marangoni in London and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. They launched their label Fyodor Golan in London in 2010 and went on to win the prestigious Fashion Fringe Award in 2011. In its short career, Fyodor Golan became known for their hand detailing and intricate leatherwork fused with a conceptualist approach to creating shapes and proportions and manipulating fabric. One would not exaggerate the importance of the label’s first foray into the official London Fashion Week calendar by stating that the fashion world has become considerably richer.
