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The Morning GIF: Drop-down gorgeous

Hussein Chalayan's drop dress design brings back an idea from the '70s.

 

Lorraine Murphy

Internet Culture

Posted on Mar 5, 2013   Updated on Jun 1, 2021, 10:46 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Couturier Hussein Chalayan is a trickster. His designs explore the relationship between clothing and disguise, between the inner self and the public presentation. Often brutally geometric, structured, flanged like an alien jellyfish made of car parts, and in a dystopian rainbow of colors from white to grey to black, “wearable” is not the first word that springs to mind when viewing his clothes.

With his latest collection presented at Paris Fashion Week, that’s changed. His latest innovation is the kind of breakthrough that makes everything afterward answer to it. He has created a line of simple heavy silk dresses adorned with ruffled collars, draped panels, and other au courant design details. With a simple tug, the dresses transform into completely different, evening-length gowns. The effect is mesmerizing and the dresses are not simply gimmicky: they are beautiful in the before as well as the after.

In the Seventies, drop-down dresses had a brief moment, although their clunky snap-on ruffles lacked elegance (and no, you could not pass it off as a stole, regardless of the sales pitch, and who the hell wore stoles in the ’70s anyway?). With this radical step forward, Chalayan has brought it into the mainstream… Well, the mainstream of couture, anyway.

GIF via Fashionably Geek

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*First Published: Mar 5, 2013, 10:57 am CST