Summary
Evening ensemble. Digitally printed silk top and skirt with matching pelmet, Mary Katrantzou, Spring/Summer 2011. Purchased from Mary Katrantzou

The maker
Mary Katrantzou was born in 1983 in Athens, Greece to an interior designer mother and a father who trained in Textile Engineering. She moved to the United States in 2003 in order to study architecture at Rhode Island School of Design. She then transferred to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London where she completed both an undergraduate and post graduate degree. Having completed her BA in textile design in 2005, Katrantzou switched her focus from prints for interiors to fashion prints. In February 2008 she had the honour of being selected to open the Central Saint Martins MA graduate show with her trompe l'oeil dresses featuring digital prints of oversized jewellery which became her signature style. Her collection was selected by 15 stockists including Browns, Joyce and Penelope in Italy and was nominated for the Harrods and the L'Oréal Professional award. Katrantzou made her debut at London Fashion Week in Autumn/Winter 2008 and has since been awarded numerous accolades including the British Fashion Council's NEWGEN sponsorship for six seasons (Summer 2009 to Winter 2011) and in 2011, the Emerging Talent award at the British Fashion Awards. Her studio is based in Islington, London and she now supplies over 100 stockists in over 30 different countries, including Selfridges in London.

Provenance
This dress was purchased for the V&A exhibition ‘Ballgowns: British Glamour since 1950’ (19 May 2012- 6 January 2013). It is a remake, made for the V&A, of catwalk look 25 from Katrantzou’s Spring/Summer 2011 collection, with a slightly altered design – the pelmet is not as deep as in the original and has a straight rather than cut-out scalloped edge.

The Design
Katrantzou’s Spring/Summer 2011 show, from which this dress is taken, made her one of the ‘must-see’ labels of London Fashion Week. The designer took inspiration from the highly stylized seventies photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin in which she noticed that the interiors in the pictures were just as important as the models. She explained "With this collection, I wanted to put the room on the woman, rather than the woman in the room." The collection was a showpiece for the craft of digital printing. Katrantzou designed the prints in three dimensions basing the designs on images from old issues of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors, laying them over her precisely fitted silhouettes. Trompe l'oeil interior details were also added through shaping, with short wide skirts mimicking lampshades and wall sconces reconfigured as necklaces. This ensemble has a matching pelmet which provides a three dimensional element to the architectural arches printed on the top, and long swathes of chiffon at the sides of the skirt which flutter like curtains. Katrantzou attributes her style, in part, to her architectural background, "I suppose it's my architectural ambition that comes into play - once I started working on clothes I was interested in how the silhouette worked in 3-D around the body”. Her latest collection (Autumn/Winter 2015) moved away from trompe l’oeil prints but retained the architectural shapes with pieces moulded to the body using technology employed in car manufacture.