For this season's collection titled "Under beauty", Spanish designer Ana Gonzalez wanted to explore the hidden beauty of life and finally found beauty in imperfection. "The shadows that live under beauty enable the light to shine more brightly", she quoted. The aim of the search for beauty may not be to flatter the senses but to reflect on extreme situations. There is always a point beyond the beautiful and the sublime, and that point is where the spectator witnesses first the demystification of the beautiful, a reinterpretation of a new order that seeks the complicity of irony and tragedy. And it is precisely that which injects new energy so that the tiresomeness of the most classical concepts of beauty can be left behind. There are schools of thought that believe that the limit of perfect beauty can be found in the dark and sinister; sinister meaning a condition needed to produce an aesthetic effect. However, in order to achieve this effect, the dark must remain hidden, as its disclosure would produce the destruction of such effect. The designer thought that one of the primary goals of fashion was to recreate beauty and, on her way to achieving this, she found out there were things that could be appreciated and used in the places she didn’t want to look at. An attraction to the abysm and hidden fascination for imperfection. An image from David Lynch’s films came to mind continuously while she worked on this collection; it was the beginning of 'Blue Velvet' when the camera first captured a perfect universe to then delve into the subsoil and visit the hell of the imperfect, grotesque and surreal, showing an entire world of insignificant, small beings feeding on and seizing so much beauty. "Under beauty" is a collection with a soft beginning which increased little by little until something exploded, revealing what lied beyond the beautiful; a universe invaded by small beings that fed on idyllic flowers and it was at that point the prints started to co-exist with each other in an ongoing combination until the insects devoured and broke up the flowers and became lost in the nothingness of a vacuum. This play on appearances was also conveyed through strict patterns and sober, all-encompassing volumes. High-quality tailoring was present throughout the entire collection and, as occured with the prints, unexpected details gradually appeared, such as false lapels and elements that broke the perfection creating subtle asymmetries. A special reinterpretation of the idyllic Liberty print gave another dimension to the colorblock, giving it some great strength and fresh vision, enhanced with hawthorn necklaces and bracelets in translucent polyester resin. A feminine take on masculine ensembles. Well done !
