“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote English politician, writer and historian John Dalberg-Acton.
Casting a critical eye on the elite has long underpinned the work of Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, the creative duo known as Matières Fécales.
Having grown up in vastly different circumstances, they “really wanted to explore that tension within our duality, but also explore specifically Hannah’s [affluent] background this season,” he said. “Because in the world we live in right now, I think there’s a lot of corruption of power.”
For their third collection, the two cast their eyes toward the 1 percent, an umbrella term to describe the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals.
A heady cocktail of fascination, repulsion, aspiration and claustrophobia is what they sought to bring to life in groups exploring the trappings of the bourgeoisie, the codes of the subculture they built over the course of a decade and one they dubbed “the immortals,” owing to the ultra-wealthy’s fascination with life extension.
The poster boy for this is Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur best known for spending millions of dollars on a longevity project he believes will enable him to beat death.
He walked in the season’s cast, which also included the likes of Michèle Lamy and Daphne Guinness sporting fresh examples of Dalton’s and Bhaskaran’s terrific tailoring and a host of more quotidian options spanning denim, sweatshirts and knitwear.
Pushed to extreme proportions, they turned into couture-like options, with hunch-shouldered jackets turning into cocoons and dramatic gowns that looked like flurries of metal feathers or of dollar bills.
During a showroom visit, details such as the comfortable waistband built into an otherwise constricting skirt, hand-shredded tweeds and the structure underpinning a deceptively simple prim cardigan spoke of their dab hand at construction, honed during their pattern-making studies.
And if the get-up of the well-heeled felt attractive, it’s not a bad thing. “The goal isn’t to just point the finger and [say] they’re bad people,” Bhaskaran said. “It’s not that they’re bad people, but I do think that it’s a time that we should be talking about it.”
“We’re interested in luxury that speaks, that says something,” Dalton added. “And I think a lot of people like it too. A lot of people want that because sometimes is luxury quiet or is it silent and complicit?”
