Mary Katrantzou is always at her best when she’s busy decorating. In her Fall collection, Interior Lives, she remembered that’s where she started out—with a lampshade skirt and trompe l’oeil prints of ornate homes surreally superimposed on shift dresses. “Well, this time I was looking at the beginnings of modernism—its roots in William Morris, up to the Bauhaus,” she said today. So then, she was off, doing her thing of importing unrelated objects into her collection inventory.
In the Katrantzou abode, we find Gobelins tapestry wrapped around dresses or patched into corsets on coats; the patterns of arts-and-crafts encaustic tiles in faux fur coats, pointillist paintings (made in glass beads) on knits, Victorian drapes swagged around shoulders of a shimmering evening column, William Morris wallpaper scissored into collages, and a silver suit of armor converted into a jacket. There was even a corner for a standard lamp that recalled Katrantzou’s earliest hit.
These days, Katrantzou has relaxed a lot of her shapes for ease of wear, including a variety of midi dresses. That, presumably, makes her work more salable for everyday purposes. But, to be honest, it’s her showpieces that are always somehow the most believable. There are many women who live in very grand houses who collect Katrantzou’s work. It’s easy to imagine one or two of them feeling absolutely at home in the drapes dress, and that super-special, richly jeweled and embroidered Renaissance portrait jacket.
