Spring Summer 2014 Ready-to-Wear: Mary Katrantzou

How on earth, can you not fall in love with Mary Katrantzou’s printastic catwalks?

For me it is impossible not to fall in love. Interesting, intricate and somehow quirky, yet feminine, Mary Katrantzou brings interesting to a whole other level. It is with this that I declare myself, a true fan of her brand.

Jokes aside, her Spring/Summer collection was amazingly loved by everyone and looking through it, it simply made me happy. I’ll give you a few hints, before talking about it: it involves brogues, prints, heels and flowers, and it is just fabulous! She shows, season after season, that the prints niche she chose, simply gets broader and broader, when everyone thought it would be the other way round.

As she has not been in the fashion scene for too long, and even though, her prints have created much of a craze, here at Estilo, we’ll give a bit of a history behind her and her aesthetic.

The History of Mary Katrantzou:

Born in 1983, in Athens to an interior designer mother and a father who trained in textile engineering, creativity had its place in their family. First heading off to the States to study Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a very famous design school in the USA. Not completely happy with this, or out of the desire to expand her creative horizons, she later transferred to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design(part of University of the Arts London), where she completed both her BA and her MA. As the MA in Fashion Textiles is a very sought after and prestigious course at Central Saint-Martins, after finishing her BA, she collaborated with Sophia Kokosalaki and managed to build up a strong portfolio, that would later on land her a place in the MA course. This all leads to her opening the Central Saint-Martins graduate show in 2008, upon finishing her prestigious MA.

Mary Katrantzou logo

Photo credit

Her graduate collection was nominated for the Harrods and L’Oréal Professional Award. She was sponsored by NewGen, a talent identification scheme created by the British Fashion Council, for 6 seasons in a row, with her first prey-a-porter collection being shown at London Fashion Week- AW2008.

Her graduate show separated from other designers who graduated at the same time as she did, by putting her in a niche. With her tromp l’oeil prints she has paved her way through London Fashion Week and got the attention of the fashion world.Her first collection immediately picked up the attention of stockists, and her, then rather small collection appeared in Browns, Joyce and Collette almost instantly, to then be picked up by other important buyers.

Her collections are always thematic and revolve around the idea of luxury, her prints being replicas of luxurious objects, such as jewelry, interiors or art.

Her aesthetic is based on prints, and her collections are complemented by capsule jewelry collections, thus highlighting her talent not only in garments, but in accessories as well.

Mary Katrantzou in her atelier

Photo courtesy of marykatrantzou.com

Now, looking through her London Fashion Week profile, you can find her stocked in over 200 high-end stores worldwide, with a great celebrity and influencer following and fashion features in some of the most prestigious industry magazines that exist.

This, lovely reader, is simply Mary Katrantzou taking over the fashion world, print by print!

Mary Katrantzou SS14 close-up-backstage

Photo courtesy of ninunina.com

Her Spring/Summer 14 collection, makes no exception from bewildering her audience. Her prints, this time based on shoes, make a statement and show that her creativity has no boundaries. This time collaborating with the embroidery house of Lesage, one of the most prestigious embroiderers existent on the planet, with whom she searched through their archived to find models that she could enlarge 200%. Her prints were then transferred on silk and more embroidery was added on top, giving the garments a 3D effect. She was not shy in matching prints with prints, and creating interesting shoes that matched the prints on the clothes.

The garments were edgy, yet with a feminine twist and she lured us into her world of masculine brogues and printed shoes-laces, as well as close-ups of the new print fetish: the shoe!

“It was joyous, upbeat and fantastically feminine, but then, we knew she was capable of all of that before we set eyes on this collection – which was mesmeric, no doubt – but with print copyists everywhere, sat poised at computers, there was just a desire in the air to see the next chapter. Because one thing is for certain, this is a designer who isn’t short on ideas.” (Vogue.com)

This is how the whole collection actually was. It was happy and showed once again how Mary can reinvent prints over and over again, without even boring us a bit.

Her latest collection’s shoe fetish, was very well described by style.com in the following quote:

“Well, they are fashion’s favorite fetish, and as the show notes pointed out, they’ve always been a fairy-tale favorite, too—glass slippers, red shoes, tokens of magic and mystery.
Katrantzou offered shoes three ways: the laces, eyelets, and perforations of polished brogues blown up to make lush abstracts; the high-tech artifice of sport shoes molding the body instead of the foot; the sugary embellishment of a delicate evening slipper spun into rococo fantasias.” (Style.com)

Blue brogue print dress