AW17 GREY GARDENS...LOVE & SQUALOR

In 1975, Albert and David Maysles filmed a documentary – Grey Gardens

This is their story. A love story. Sort of. Hailed as one of the oddest, most beautiful films ever.

“And I tell you, if there’s anything worse than a staunch woman … S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There’s nothing worse, I’m telling you. They don’t weaken, no matter what.”

Part Miss Havisham, part Warhol superstars, the mother/daughter duo Edith “Little Edie” Beale and Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale – respectively, cousin and aunt of Jackie O Kennedy– lived alone and in squalor, in a crumbling Long Island manse Grey Gardens

In their once-magnificent, now faded, rodent-infested Long Island estate, the pair – more like competitive sisters than mother and daughter – bicker and squabble, reconcile, sing old show tunes and, most of all, dwell on the vanished Atlantis of their glory days, a time of cotillions, debutante balls, summer estates, swimming parties, the Social Register, ceaseless champagne and splendid wealth and then set about capturing their strange little castaway universe of ecstatic nostalgia and present-day ruination

And what a pair they make! Trapped in a world of memory and sic transit gloria mundi, they instantly call to mind indelible, time-trapped and memory-ridden figures emitting unselfconscious stardom and fabulousness

Little Edie’s ingenious scarves (constructed of anything but actual scarves), her peculiar, pantyhose-based fashion aesthetic and her insane makeshift skirts (ditto), to say nothing of her incessant singing and her flag-waving Yankee-Doodle-Dandy dance in the hallway, make her the unquestionably the star of “Grey Gardens” and this collection

She is a star, an unforgettable melodramatic heroine, rather than purely an object of pity or derision
Edie is a model of aphoristic composure amid total insanity and decay and ruination, a perversely magnificent figure whose disordered charisma remains potent

A haunting portrait of upper-class decay returns in a new restoration, and it's more endearing than weird... you’re in for an otherworldly experience

Neither of them was cut out for the cushioned prison of upper-class marriage and motherhood, and by choice or out of necessity they turned their backs on that world and carved their own deeply strange paths

But then it occurs to one that the point was not to resist or defer chaos, but to invite it!

Grey Gardens .. Love and Squalor, AW17 collection is a series of looks devoted to this haunting love story amidst beauty and decay

There is a decadence added to these by way of lush fabrics, textures, hand embroidered flowers and bespoke handcrafted headpieces

Fabrics such as velvets, faux leather, crepe, wool, tassles , glitter tulle and metallic poly silks form the foundation over which vintage silhouettes branch out into modernized bomber jackets , biker dresses and smoking jacket suits