At feminine Vionnet, Chalayan brings the tech

Tonight’s ‘demi-couture’ offering from Vionnet has been highly anticipated since the announcement in the new year that British designer Hussein Chalayan would be co-curating the collection alongside creative director Goga Ashkenazi.

It’s the label’s first venture beyond ready-to-wear in its latest incarnation, but it fits perfectly given the house’s heritage and origins, its founder and namesake once a rival to Coco Chanel during the early days of the discipline.

As such it married the codes of the house and the talents of Chalayan brilliantly: technically strong dresses that felt as light as a feather, in keeping with Chalayan’s own taste for juxtaposition and the importance the house’s founder laid on ease of movement and non-restrictive garments.

Mostly full-length gowns, the collection employed pleats, sheers and geometries to create pieces that in some places foregrounded the structure and ergonomics of the original toiles – these were covered in graphics that recalled 3D printing or prototype nets, complete with folds and tabs marked on – with luxe and lightweight tulles and chiffon, jigsawed in places with blocked colour, bright yellows and pinks, and pleats of all variations, from micro Fortuny-style rivulets to flapping and flowing carwash pleats.

There were leather straps too that resembled wires, along necklines or framing sleeves, in keeping with the feeling of dresses as motherboards, patched together in order to make a coherent whole.

It remains to be seen whether Chalayan will stay for further seasons but his tastes here served to move the label beyond its trademark feminine drapes and ease into something more scientific and more conceptually laboured – but it felt, for all that, still as light as air.

Click the gallery to see all the looks from the Vionnet demi-couture spring 2014 collection