Viktor & Rolf Couture Spring 2025: Prompting the Imagination
“Beige trench in silk gazar, white shirt in silk gazar, blue trousers in silk gazar,” droned in French a disembodied and slightly robotic voice as each Viktor & Rolf passage came into view.
It wasn’t a glitch of the sound system in the gilded salons of the Westin Hotel. Those three polished staple garments composed all 24 silhouettes the design duo created for their spring couture collection.
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Not that there was a single duplicate in the lot. “The same description, except that you see 24 times something very different,” Viktor Horsting said backstage before showing a collection where he and Rolf Snoeren played with volumes, proportions and textile manipulations.
And if the succinct description sounded a little like the prompt you’d feed to an image generator, you had it on the nose. “It’s a bit like a human interpretation of the endless possibilities of artificial intelligence,” Snoeren said.
How to make daywear into sculptural eveningwear was the throughline of the duo’s spring work. Serving as a further modifier in their iterations was gazar, the structured woven silk famously developed by Cristóbal Balenciaga in the 1960s with Swiss textile company Abraham.
Differences in its warp and weft give it “a life of its own and requirements of its own,” Snoeren said. And this isn’t the design duo’s first time delving deep into its properties — 25 years ago, they’d already turned out an entire collection from gazar.
The Dutch design duo opened their show with a knee-length trench with sculptural lantern-like sleeves, worn over a tuxedo shirt and dress shorts.
Each outfit that followed offered a glamorous variation. Shirts were stretched into ballooning mullet gowns, slinky floor-length shirtdresses or were simply impeccably classic in their execution.
Trousers came wide-legged and with generous turned up hems, shrunk against the leg as extra-slim cuts, crinkled into ruffly bloomers or even invisible, tucked as underlayers.
The trench turned into an opera-length coat strewn with myriad individually knotted thin bows; a multitiered dress; knotted around the waist into gowns, or even as the dress of a little doll carried by a model wearing the rest of the set.
After a week of menswear shows where classics dominated, Viktor & Rolf’s exuberant variations around a trio of staples felt like a reminder that all you need is imagination.
While most are still feeling their way around the place of AI in creation, here was a expansive argument that no matter the medium or method, “in the end, it starts with an idea,” as Snoeren put it.
Launch Gallery: Viktor & Rolf Spring 2025 Couture
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