A photograph of the designer and writer Pauline de Rothschild in her bedroom, with its hand-painted chinoiserie panels of flowering plants and trees, was Mary Katrantzou’s starting point for pre-fall. “This season,” she said, “I was really looking at this connection between interiors and exteriors.” Hence Rothschild’s “trompe l’oeil conservatoire,” and other dresses depicting ceiling cornices out of an Italian palazzo, and formal gardens of the sort seen at Versailles.
Trompe l’oeil motifs are a longstanding signature of Katrantzou’s, and some of her followers might experience déja vu flipping through this lookbook. That is entirely intentional. “We always reintroduce a print from our archive. When you’ve been in the game for 15 years, they’re almost vintage,” she said with a laugh.
Recently named the creative director of leather goods and accessories at Bulgari, Katrantzou also designed the gowns worn by performers at the Olympic Flame Handover Ceremony at the temple of Hera in Greece earlier this year. The dresses boasted trompe l’oeil details of their own in the form of black and white doric columns, like relics out of ancient Olympia. “The idea was to take inspiration from the environment itself, and play on the idea that at the Acropolis the actual columns are women, they’re symbols of the strength of women.” She reported that she received some customer requests for special orders, but had to decline them. “We had to explain they were a gift for the Olympic Committee and also for Greece.”
Here, the motifs are more subdued, more traditionally feminine. The silhouettes also tend to be simple—tried-and-true instead of experimental, as in a fitted midi-length tank dress which also features embroidery, and a fluid caftan. That’s wisdom gleaned from experience; a bold print makes extreme shapes unnecessary. It may indeed be something she gleaned from that favorite photo of Rothschild’s bedroom, which is notably spare save for those detailed chinoiserie panels.