There was a lot of tension in the presentation of Bianca Saunders’s collection. In a basement at the Palais de Tokyo, her models, wearing the clothes you see here, each had a leg or arm swathed in a long length of stretch tulle, at the end of which was tied a weighty bundle. Each man’s job was to laboriously drag this weight across the concrete floor. It was a slow, torturous process that gave plenty of time to project meaning onto the visuals: stretched nerves, the weight of the world, all that sort of thing?
It was more conceptual than that. All the pulling and physicality going on related back to Saunders’s first-principles process of designing by observing how clothes move, crease, stretch, and wrinkle up on male bodies in action. Thus, an interesting off-centeredness in her garments has become her signature: a V-neckline that is slightly pulled to one side, how the stripes in a granddad sweater glitch into irregular waves, or how a pair of this season’s high-waist technical taffeta trousers had an asymmetric triangle in one leg.
Saunders has been refining her techniques for quite a while: They are subtle and cool and don’t shout, but when worn, they have the close-up effect of making you look twice. For this, Saunders is the current recipient of the BFC/GQ Fashion Fund—£100,00 plus business mentoring. She shows in Paris these days but still lives and works in London, which is where she met and bonded with the spatial artist Shanti Bell, who collaborated with her on the staging of the performance. Bell and she are alumni of London’s Royal College of Art, an academic institution specifically intended to foster interdisciplinary collaborations.
