Couture has enchanted me for ages. Since I was a little girl, reading about couture gowns and flipping through books that study fashion through the ages, I’ve always been captivated by its romance and delicacy. It is soft, alluring, but simultaneously subtle and striking. It celebrates femininity and heightens your standards – for dressing, for carrying oneself, for living.
What a breathtaking evening to remember, that Sunday night at DC Fashion Week’s 30th International Couture Collections Showcase. As each designer unfurled their latest creations, each seemed to surpass the last, in striking quality and novelty. Guests were privileged to enjoy such a fashionable event, as the full display truly was a feast to the eyes.
Fittingly hosted at La Maison Francaise (the Embassy of France), the final installment of the weekend’s events was the best and most beautiful way of saving the best for last – worthy of an ultimate grand finale.
“It’s a representation of the rich cultural diversity that our great city offers,” said DC Fashion Week’s executive director Ean Williams of the event. Given that five different countries were represented, exhibiting their fall and winter collections for 2019, his words never once fell short. The show featured the following five designers:
- Beauty by God (Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine)
- Charlie Mub Couture ( Zimbabwe )
- Corjor International (United States)
- Mikayla by Mikayla Frick (United States)
- Sierra Mitchell (United States)
Guests of all ages had opportunity to work in on the “red carpet,” showing off their glamest cocktail attire, or ultra-trendy creations.
Mikayla Frick
Mikayla Frick pursues a “sleek, yet bold” aesthetic. Her use of varied textures and materials in her collection created a striking runway aura, worthy of critical acclaim by its spectators. Each piece, a unique sillhouette with every new fabric incorporated in one look after another, left a memorable impression in such a way that only an artist can evoke. Every new fabric exhibited its own form of movement, catching light in a new way, hugging the body in its own fashion, drawing the eye from one curve to the next, as it pleases. “Each garment,” she says, “is a direct representation of fashioning the good from within the bad.” O-K-U-R-R. *Snaps in Z-formation.*
Then came the concluding collection – the crescendo that brought the show to a close with such finale that all of us were left clutching our pearls. The final designer of the evening brought down the house with absolutely smashing success. Ball gowns galore, floor-skimming hemlines, high slits, plunging necklines, shimmering metallics, bold silhouettes – front row onlookers offered many an appreciative ooh and ahh.
And the final dress of the night…viewers were stunned, breathless, but not so breathless as to save their gasps and ahhhhhh’s. Out came the model, striding with calculated purpose and pace, slowly, so that everyone could feast their eyes on the gown that she donned. Like the gown before her, it was a ball gown style, a cascading sillhouette in a black skirt covered in a gorgeous gold lace overlay worthy of King Louis XIV himself. The bodice was as slimming and stunning – it was, in effect, two black strips of sheer tulle that wrapped her slim waist, covered her breasts, and criss-crossed over her back.
But what seized our attention was the adornment covering her face: strapped on her head was a sizable, circular mask, black, encircled at its perimeter in a delicate lace pattern resembling a costume piece you’d see at the Dia de los Muertos festival in Mexico. The central shape of the lace cascaded downward into that of a skull. Then there were the eyes – round eyes that blinked a glowing green, as though they looked straight at you, saw right through you, in a supernatural kind of way. It was frightening. It was striking. It was stunning.