Musicians always say the second album is the hardest. After their critically acclaimed debut last season, you might expect Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, the creative duo behind Matières Fécales, to hit a similar creative drought.
It turns out, the Canadian couple already have their first four collections mapped out. “It’s been a decade in the making, so it’s less of an overnight success — if anything, for us, it’s about time,” Bhaskaran said backstage before the show.
Having struck a nerve with their brand of extreme glamour, this season they were ready to reveal a softer side. “A lot of people see us and maybe our community as very harsh, Gothic, scary, ugly — all those type of words is what we always hear. So for us, this was about just showing the prettiness,” Dalton said.
The muse of the collection, she opened the show in a pink satin hourglass skirt suit that matched the roses that tumbled down a marble chimneyplace at the show venue on Place Vendôme — some wilting, like a metaphor for imperfection.
The corset waist on a pink tulle Degas dancer dress was cinched just a tad too tightly. Tweed skirt suits looked like they had been put through the shredder.
But there was delicate beauty too in the barely-there layer of tulle draped over an ivory bomber jacket; the trailing cummerbund on a sheer black tuxedo shirt and pants, or a blush satin slip worn with a winged headdress, one of several terrific hats designed by Stephen Jones.
The label, part of the brand development division of Dover Street Market Paris, suggested how it might live on the street with oversize jeans and T-shirts featuring self-portraits by French queer artist Pierre Molinier. Christian Louboutin’s fetishistic shoes were designed to give the outfits an edge, but the effect backfired on several models who clutched the scenery for support.
The looks were modeled by friends of the brand ranging from Colin Jones, fresh off her CR Fashion Book cover shoot in a feathery dress by the duo, to Nikki Lilly, a British content creator and campaigner with an arteriovenous malformation, who walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in a red Matières Fécales gown.
Bhaskaran said it was a way to reclaim a space that is the definition of exclusive. “In some landscapes — this environment of Place Vendôme — people like us aren’t really welcome, so it’s actually about taking that obstacle and turning it into something that’s beautiful,” he said.
At a time when model diversity appears to be regressing, it made for a powerful statement. As the saying goes, why fit in when you were born to stand out?