Viktor & Rolf Stop Ready-to-Wear Collections To Focus On Couture

Echoing the renewed aims of Jean Paul Gaultier, Viktor & Rolf have also now announced that they will halt ready-to-wear collections in order to focus on couture, fragrance and licensing. Following a radical haute couture show in Paris last week (exaggerated floral babydolls with stacked flip flops and a wheat sheaf headdress, anyone?) the Dutch design duo informed WWD that ‘the decision was made in concert with majority shareholder OTB Group, the holding of Italian industrialist Renzo Rosso.’ Rosso added that it was ‘a strategic decision to position the Viktor & Rolf brand in the highest luxury segment of fashion.’

Since launching in 1993 Viktor & Rolf have always sat comfortably at a distance from the edges of commerciality. Yes, their wildly popular Flowerbomb fragrance catapulted the pair into the mass market, but their clothes have remained a favourite of the avant-garde or the more adventurous A-Lister.

Their ‘simple' tailoring that you may not so often see – white shirts, tuxedo jackets – are a perfect fit, but the general view on the designers' aesthetic will always jump to the outré moments: red carpet dresses actually made out of red carpet, a model-cum-Russian-doll swathed in 10 layers of clothing and de-robed as an art installation on the runway, topiary-style tulle cut-away into illusionary silhouettes that shape-shift…. These kind of marvels call out for a gallery space or, as appears to be their strength, a couture customer.

‘We feel a strong need to refocus on our artistic roots. We have always used fashion to communicate, it is our primary means of artistic expression,’ Viktor Horsting told WWD. Thanks to the relentless season-upon-season schedule, the designers, like so many others, ‘started to feel creatively restricting. By letting go of it, we gain more time and freedom.’

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