The Espace Pierre Cardin, the venue for the Songzio show, is just opposite the Elysée Palace – the French white house, and the US Embassy happens to be on the corner of the street. It’s Friday Day IV of Paris Fashion Week and BDMOTP is invited at the Songzio runway show where we are kindly mentioned in the press release as ‘prominent fashion bloggers’. But unbeknownst to us the president of the Fédération Française de la Couture is also watching the show – and that is a very important person during FW in Paris. Not a good moment then for a mishap to take place during the show when a divided runway in the form of a shape of the letter ‘U’ leads to much confusion on the part of the models because the light fixture above the runway is not placed directly overhead. The painful result is models wobbling and drifting across the second leg of the ‘U’ while they approach a second battery of photographers sitting and waiting at the end. But the photographers cannot get the models straight in their lenses because the light fixture is on the side. OMG! Some of the photographers start calling out loud throughout the show for the models to ‘move over’ – they are professionals after all and earn their living this way. And surely Vogue is not paying for halfway shots. So it’s a bloody mess. Not something monsieur le président would have wanted to see no doubt. And not something he will forget.
But the Songzio’s 15/16 FW collection is refreshing wind of dark but winter-ish air. The show is themed an ‘autumn evening’ but because the creator’s main signature is working with many shades of black (yes, not all shades on the fourth spectrum are shades of grey) the mood comes across as winter rather than fall. No colors here except for on the leather textile prints which appear with leaves or branches, or even with lumps of earth. These do remind of autumn somehow because the colors are beige, raisin, and sierra brown, yet the models wearing these flashback printed leather textiles look like retro superhero assistants out of a forgotten and unknown early sixties TV show – before the age of color so that you just have to imagine the paint into it. Beige, sierra, raisin, and even poison green – in textile patterns of pebbles, checkers, leaves, and twigs. That’s a whole lot for one winter afternoon.
And if that were perhaps all, this story would be finished soon, but this is where Songzio actually takes off and reaches into the unknown because now why NOT both have and wear cigarette pants if you are taking the dangerous route of retro superhero assistants you’d probably ask? And that is a good question. For cigarette pants – yes those ugly slender & tight double-pipe trousers still popular at the time of the first James Bond – were actually the most remarkable item BDMOTP noticed in the show. Especially when they are plastered with ugly patterns and feature in an even a more meaningless color. Yuck – camel, orange raisin, and that metallic poison green on scarab in ugly checkers worn as what appears to be a skirt, jeez – it’s bloody brilliant, yes, and one single good look makes up bigtime for all the mishap at the show.
But we are not so sure that monsieur le président will see it that way. He may have a more traditional view of things. But we love it. This is what we came for.
The remainder of the show was actually very stylish and traditional both in cut & tailoring and was all done exquisitely in those many shades of black – the Songzio signature. It featured wonderfully cut coats, jackets, and suits for men in metallic, jet, scarab, ink, oil, ebony, crow, raven, charcoal, and yes, even in obsidian. But that’s another story. For another day another show. For suffice to say that mishap or no mishap that what we came for was the privilege of witnessing those orange California Raisins leather textile printed cigarette pants. Featured at the Espace Pierre Cardin on a cold and gloomy Friday in the middle of Paris Fashion Week.
Posted by Sandro Joo and photos by Franz Kennedy.
