Andrew GN showed his Ready-to-Wear Autumn Winter 2017 collection at Palais de Tokyo, in the minimalist urban sorroundings of the basement. No posh empire decorations, no special effects, no inventive scenography or video projections. Just fashion.

The backstage zone was overcrowded as always and reminded the legend of the Babylon tower. All the languages, nationalities and shades of skin got mixed in this secret room.

The models from all over the world, represented all the diversity of the human race. They talked on English with the stuff and on their mothertangue if they were lucky to find their home people among other models or journalists bustling in and out. Some of them doesn’t speak English at all or pretend not to in order to avoid the trite questions of the reporters. Anyway it only enriched the notion of authenticity, which apparently was the main aesthetical demand for this year cast.

The theme of the collection is our tribal past. The designer urges to explore how we manage to preserve our identity in the global world. The answer, which Andrew GN proposes, is to make our identity global, to enrich the global beauty by the heritage we got from our ancestors. That’s why there are so many folk motives in his collection.

The ornaments, printed or embroided, refer to the multiple traditions from all over the world – starting from ancient Egyptian or Central American motives ending up by a Scandinavian folklore. That’s how the globalism of authenticity is reached. Andrew Gn mixes the sacral symbolic patrimony of the nations, the sources of their pride and shows up how they can coexist together, complement one another, opening the new dimension of the beauty.

Being fascinated by own ethnographical experiment, Andrew GN goes even further and admixes the elements of Modernist European paintings, appealing to the art of Gustav Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley. The designer constructs a dialogue between epochs and cultures, transferring the idea that, regardless the origins, the essential sense of beauty unites us all and makes us equal. 

Developing the dialogue, Andrew Gn also explores interplay between the culture and the nature by juxtaposing different kinds of materials, complementing wool with velvet or mixing natural and artificial colors.

As a result, the designer fulfills an interesting aesthetical experiment. He contributes the signs of our ancient, culturally individualized past into the urban world, into the streets of modern city. He interrogates the limits of authentic and global, which is a question, worthy to be posed by a serious socially engaged contemporary artist.

Article:

Written by Maksym Teteruk

Photo grabs by The Selectist

Video:

Hosted by Maiken Lorentz

Camera operation and edit by Franck Renoir