As usual, it is not just a Couture collection that Charles de Vilmorin presents at Baccarat’s, the most baroque crystal house in the world of luxury. With its oversized cuts worthy of an opera, its all-over illustrated motifs of faces borrowed from the caricature genre of the early 20th century, the painter-couturier offers us a whole gallery of characters.
This grand theater is rooted in the vivid Venetian colors of the Commedia dell’Arte. However, the collection owes its freshness to its dialogues with more wierd and avant-garde universes. His expressionist portraits are directly inspired by the carnival atmospheres of James Ensor, this Flemish painter whom he cites as a major reference in his work. With their psychedelique tones and hallucinated eyes, these creatures also come from outer space, as he compares them to alien.
To which, Charles infuses his own sense of performance and improvisation (an approach specific to the tradition of Commedia dell’Arte), like the one he collectively carried out with Bachelor students from the IFM (ex- Chambre Syndicale de la Couture), the school from which he graduated. They spontaneously anarchically covered a dress in spray paint during a video shooting.
Could his sense of “mise en scène” one day give life to a real theater show? Charles will answer you that such a project was no longer just a dream.
More coming soon…
