Beautifully broken and absolutely unwilling to behave. Some sustainable fashion collections want you to admire their credentials; others look like they might cut you on the way into the party. Genaro Rivas’ A Shard Reborn, shown at 30 Knightsbridge during London Fashion Week, happily belongs to the latter.
The premise is poetic enough: rupture, transformation, the possibilities hidden in what remains. But thankfully, Rivas doesn’t translate that into a collection of tasteful beige upcycling. His version of rebirth has plexiglass spikes, exposed zips, metal hardware, trailing cords, translucent armour and enough sharp-looking appendages to make hugging someone a logistical exercise.
And it looks fantastic.
The collection takes pre-owned clothing, including pieces sourced on eBay, and dismantles and reworks it rather than pretending it was born yesterday. Jackets sprout eyelets and lengths of zipper. Tailoring is sliced open, extended and laced together. Familiar garments seem to have gone through some glamorous industrial accident and emerged considerably more interesting.
The menswear is particularly good at this. Black sleeveless tailoring is punctured with oversized silver eyelets, while zips escape from garments and wind around wrists like fashion’s answer to loose electrical wiring. One long black look turns those dangling lines into almost a drawing around the body. It’s severe, slightly dystopian and extremely satisfying.
Then there are the womenswear pieces worn on models who appear to have been assembled from couture, hardware store supplies and fragments of some fabulous alien spacecraft.
A huge smoky-grey tulle gown comes armed with a glossy blood-red plexiglass structure climbing from the torso to the throat. It’s beautiful, sinister and wonderfully excessive. Part evening gown, part exoskeleton, part exotic creature you definitely shouldn’t touch.
Elsewhere, transparent and mirrored shards form sculptural bodices over the body, turning the collection’s central metaphor into something pleasingly literal.
The strongest trick is the collision between softness and threat. Frothy tulle meets rigid plastic. Bare skin sits beside metal. Delicate transparent layers are interrupted by objects that resemble blades, feathers or splintered machinery. A shimmering beaded mini dress looks almost conventionally pretty until you register its fragmented, dangling construction. A black off-the-shoulder gown, meanwhile, is comparatively restrained, which in this company makes it feel almost suspicious.
Rivas also has fun with movement. Zipper strips cascade from a corseted black dress before dissolving into acid yellow and white at the hem, making the wearer look as though she’s glitching into another outfit. Long ribbons and cords trail behind tailored jackets. Nothing feels completely contained. The clothes are always transitioning apart or becoming something else.
That makes the use of materials from Savian, Ponda and Banofi especially apt. Alongside aluminium, metal and plexiglass, they broaden the idea of reconstruction beyond simply chopping up old clothes. The interesting question here isn’t “Can waste look luxurious?” fashion has asked that plenty of times. It’s closer to: what happens when you stop treating a garment’s previous life as something that needs to be erased?
The answer, apparently, is cyber-goth aristocrats roaming around a Knightsbridge drawing room.
The setting makes the whole thing even more delicious. Damask wallpaper, ornate mirrors, marble, framed landscapes and black-and-white floors surround clothes full of industrial fastenings and futuristic surfaces. The photographs capture that clash brilliantly, particularly the flash-heavy colour shots and stark black-and-white portraits. Everyone looks less like they are waiting backstage and more like members of an extremely chic secret society who have just inherited the house.
There’s also something refreshingly physical about the collection. You can see the handwork. You notice where things attach, loop, pierce, hang and connect. Instead of disguising construction, Rivas turns construction into decoration. The fastening is the embellishment. The repair becomes the silhouette. The scar gets to be the pretty bit.
Catching up with Genaro in the foyer after his show, he gave us some insights into his inspiration and motivation for this new collection. ”I was interested in what happens after something breaks. When the fragments are no longer evidence of destruction, but the raw material for a new identity.
I wanted the audience to see not only how an idea evolves, but also how a material can acquire a different emotional charge each time it returns. This season also pushes my language of transformation further.
The aluminium dress, developed with Maya Heritage and Phill Welch from Phil Creates Studio in East London, was the ultimate technical and conceptual challenge. Aluminium resists the body. It is cold, industrial and rigid, so making it appear soft and fluid required me to negotiate constantly with the material. It became the final look because it embodies the contradiction at the heart of the collection: armour that moves like skin.”
That is where A Shard Reborn lands its idea without becoming overly earnest about it. This isn’t restoration. These garments haven’t been lovingly returned to some imaginary pristine condition. They’ve been allowed to mutate.
And really, why come back as your old self when you could come back wearing a plexiglass breastplate, twelve metres of rogue zipper and a gown that looks capable of drawing blood?
Broken? Technically. Reborn? Absolutely. Subtle? Thank God, no.
Credits
Words and Backstage Photography by Lewis Robert Cameron
Creative Direction & Design by Genaro Rivas @genarorivas
Hair by Michael Kent @michaelkent_hairdressing and SofnFree @mysofnfree_uk
Mua Jo Mitakidou @jo.mitakidou
Sustainable Jewellery by Dayli Jewels @dayli.jewels
Reworked sourced at eBay UK @olgamieloszyk
Aluminium + Plexiglass dress and pieces @phillcreatesstudioltd @mayamyselfandi
Underwear @organicbasics
Talent @originsofcjm @wokemgmt
Team @alejandra_ocrospoma @ashlynrowlandd @ria_bhalla_
Special thanks to @30knightsbridge @llamainnldn @caviarandcoevents
@spraga.uk
