Rok Hwang’s show at the Petit Palais was an invitation into another dimension — not via a yellow brick road, but a blue metallic one instead.
The museum’s steps were covered with blue glass bricks, an installation by Jean-Michel Othoniel, while the show began with pulses of colored light and eerie sound reminiscent of the famous scene in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The new dimension was a place where workwear morphs into evening gowns, and vice versa, where clothing is torn apart, with the bits pieced back together to create something new.
Hwang took heavy cotton gabardine — classic trenchcoat fabric — and folded and buttoned it into long, low-slung skirts and halter tops, or transformed it into wrap skirts with cargo pockets. He topped off the look with soft, loose jackets or boned corset tops.
He flipped eveningwear back to front, as in a gown with a crisscross front exposing a bare torso, and a liquid blue slipdress with a hole cut to reveal the model’s stomach.
You May Also Like
The simplest pieces were the winners here — a long, midnight blue trench dress, with a white hankie peeking from the pocket; a short, asymmetric denim jacket with a cape sleeve, and a sheer, sparkly bodysuit wrapped in a luscious feathery stole.
Even the glossy PVC dresses — in electric blue or snow white — had form, and managed to capture the otherworldly mood of the show with their sticky, plastic surfaces.
By contrast, all those piece-y silhouettes with their flaps and buttons and floppy straps looked fussy, unwieldy and just plain awkward on humans, although the aliens might think otherwise.