Last season, Viktor & Rolf sent instant memes down the runway. This season, they went back to clothes, with a faintly pagan ritual-in-the-woods feeling. Per Vogue:

Calling the collection Spiritual Glamour, the designers noted how they were playing into the original definition of glamour as casting a spell. “Our spell is to transform the feeling of doom about our environment into positive action,” said Horsting. To do so, they enlisted help, marking their first time collaborating so directly with someone else. Claudy Jongstra has spent decades developing her own textiles—raising rare Drenthe Heath sheep and producing the botanical pigments—from a farm near the northern Netherlands village of Húns. More recently, she headed up a research group to re-create Burgundian Black, ostensibly the holy grail of dyes used during the Renaissance (black being associated with status and fashion even back then).

The process involves magical-sounding ingredients like woad and madder, and the result, a dense black felt, is what the duo used throughout the lineup but especially for the night-sky scenes on coats and dresses worn by models who were either punklike or witchlike but not the least bit irreverent. […]  Without the backstory, the designs had interest, but as a specific Kate Bush–goes–glam vision. Interestingly, though, if this collection seemed like the antithesis of Iris van Herpen’s high-tech engineering and futuristic fabrics, both treat couture like a laboratory through which they arrive at new ideas manifested as quasi-historical dress. 

There are lots of yin-yang symbols and suns and ruffles, and plenty of brightness and kooky silhouettes. It’s not chasing a social media moment, though, and that’s not a bad thing.

[Photos: Imaxtree]