My Spidey Sense is Tingling

Fashion, they say, is a young man's game. (Oh, surely someone has said that -- they say it about everything else!) So young, evidently, that some of them are still reading comic books and collecting superhero dolls. (Oh, I'm sorry -- action figures. Very important distinction.) Here, take a look:





And here's the creator of these sophisticated ensembles:

What is he, 16???

Actually, he's 32 -- that photo happens to make him look particularly young. His name is Felipe Oliviera Baptista and he's a Portuguese designer who showed the above looks at the Fall 2007 Couture shows in Paris this month. You can see the whole collection and his previous collections here. Based on the t-shirt he's wearing and a few other looks from the show, he appears actually to be taking his inspiration from luchadores. (Trust me, this is not better than superheroes.) I'd like to say this is a flukey season from someone with a lot of promise, but I'm not prepared to go that far. He seems to have some... interesting ideas about shape and proportion, but is a little ham-handed in the execution of them. Not to mention some rather distressingly literal interpretations of what was evidently an equestrian theme in a previous collection:

Seriously?

Also, he appears to have a penchant for covering his models faces when showing the clothes. This is probably a device to throw focus to the garments themselves instead of the girls wearing them, but still... it gives me a bit of the willies. I find it a little dehumanizing.


Not that I'm positive he's all that interested in humans anyway:

(Still trying to work out how this fits into the collections with the horsey bits. Not having any luck with that.)

Ah, couture. Sometimes sumblime, sometimes... not so sublime. Still, I'm glad there's a forum for folks to indulge their flights of fancy, even if said flights are punctuated with the clip-clop of hooves.

(Will be showing you some of the sublimer parts in the next few days -- stay tuned!)

Photos: Elle.com