Talk about a body of work.
After three decades designing, you’d think Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren had done it all. But it turns out they’d never done a bathing or bodysuit — not to that extent at least.
That’s certainly corrected after their fall couture collection.
“We projected all the codes of the house that we’ve been developing over the past 30 years onto this tiny garment,” Snoeren said backstage, pointing out the ruffles, bows, flowers and XXL letters that abounded in a season that felt celebratory and a bit of a gauntlet, too.
For all their experience, working on the smallest surface possible made them chuckle as much as “it frightened me a little bit,” Horsting admitted. “So usually take that as a good sign.”
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One could play fashion show bingo to tease out provenance (hands up, those who didn’t) with the nods to the jutting corsetry of spring 2022, spring 2018’s weaves, the impossible outfits see in January, a full-body white ruffle from the “Blacklight” spring 1999 collection; and a cascade of bows nodding to the 2005 launch of their Flowerbomb perfume.
There were also a deceptively simple bikini with a sharply executed box pleated ruffle and continuations to the messages of the spring 2019 collection with new sayings that went “Dream on,” “I wish you well,” or plain “No,” which had Shakira joking that “yes was overrated” when she arrived at the show wearing a jacket saying just that.
Ever tongue-in-cheek, Horsting and Snoeren had even added themselves to the lineup, in the shape of tuxedos piggy-backing on, being dragged behind or simply strolling on the catwalk.
Asked what was harder to finesse between one of their terrific tuxedos and these, Horsting gamely said he wasn’t going to “underestimate making a bodysuit anymore.”
Particularly not when the ones they sent out did not rely on elastic properties to conform to curves, instead having molded silk organza, gazar or crepe into shape, as Snoeren explained backstage.
After all that, was a torso-sized format enough space for three decades of wit and couture wizardry? From the looks of it, that suited Horsting and Snoeren just fine.