In what he described as “perhaps the most technically complex collection of my career,” Stéphane Rolland realized a childhood dream without missing a beat. “Since I was a child, I have been passionate about Ravel’s ‘Boléro.’ For years, I have dreamed of setting a runway show to it,” Rolland said backstage, before guests including Cardi B and Angela Bassett took their seats in the auditorium of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées with its Art Deco setting.
Thanks to the availability of the theater, with its associations to Ravel’s work, as well as a chance meeting with conductor Zahia Ziouani, it seems the stars were aligned, but it took 18 months to bring the ambitious project to life.
The music transcended Rolland as he sketched, dictating his shapes and resulting in a combination of Spanish, Japanese and futuristic influences, juxtaposing Ravel’s structure with the sensuality of his muse, dancer Ida Rubinstein. “The collection is intrinsically linked with the rhythm of the composition,” he explained. “It has a very specific structure, quite mechanical, and so I sketched as if I were composing music, that is to say I tried to let the gesture of my hand stop all of a sudden, then start again, as if it were taking flight.”
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The opening looks, set to a soundtrack of metronomes and sewing machines before Ziouani’s Divertimento Orchestra was revealed behind the curtain, nodded to the notes of a musical score, with rounded crotchets and curved yet jagged semiquavers sculpted from swathes of crêpe and satin on jumpsuits, cutaway dresses and matador coats. Sculpted geometric headdresses or hairstyles shaped like musical notes were the accompaniments for his giant tuxedo dresses, glittering plastrons and gowns that at times hugged the body, at others ballooned like luscious flowers, in a symbolically charged palette of black, red, white and gold.