In the garden of the senses with Palomo's SS27 For the brand's tenth anniversary, Alejandro Palomo turns his thoughts to the Renaissance
The SS27 show by Palomo Spain, staged at sunset in the rose garden of Madrid's Parque del Oeste, takes its title from the Latin motto «Et in Arcadia Ego». A mysterious phrase that for centuries has evoked a return to an ancestral and legendary place — Arcadia of pastoral poetry throughout the ages, yet also a place that does not exist, a kind of earthly paradise accessible only through memory. But in the collection that Alejandro Palomo presented yesterday, there is no bitterness or nostalgia — quite the opposite: it is a celebration of what his brand can be and what it has become over the past ten years, not unlike the rose labyrinth through which his looks paraded.
Palomo has always cultivated an aesthetic that is perhaps more languid than fluid — a glam rock romanticism that is at once delicate, lush, and precious. It can be highly theatrical, it's true: at yesterday's show we saw music headphones transformed into feathered headpieces, womenswear looks that were all cascading fringe, crystals and near-liquid satins, adorned with heavy jewellery, tousled fin-de-siècle hairstyles, and further hourglass silhouettes of dramatic volume. One model clutched around herself a sort of dressing gown with red feather-trimmed hems, while another paired her black tiered dress with an electric guitar. All characters in a universe — that of the brand — which presents itself as a flowering of possibilities and identities. Theatre, in a word.
In the collection's menswear counterpart, as well as in the more everyday womenswear looks, there was a distinct desire to take functional, everyday elements of clothing — from military jackets to jeans, Canadian tuxedoes, and wide-leg trousers — and transfigure them through colour and the application of more precious and delicate materials. Rigour and languor shifted the meaning of individual ensembles, transforming them into something more lyrical and airy. A tank top was crafted in organza and turned into a kind of long tunic; jeans were covered in light feathers and paired with stiff, cropped suede jackets, while from beneath certain jackets cascaded curtains of golden fringe. Many of the fine sartorial details on the men's suits — pockets and even cummerbunds — were shaped like bow ties, with a touch of surrealism.
In this tenth-anniversary collection for the brand — a physically enormous show, spread across a vast garden and animated by a drum performance among the rose bushes that perfectly symbolised the grit hidden beneath the theatricality and swooning excess — Alejandro Palomo celebrated everything his brand can be, but above all everything it has yet to become. His is a vision extraordinarily balanced between pure aesthetics and wearability, between poetry and sensuality. «This is precisely what fashion consists of», the show notes read, «opening up, for an instant, the possibility of another reality. Arcadia was never a place, but the shape taken by the desire to imagine oneself free».
