When the clothes don't meet the music

What happens when four leading designers appear together in a fashion show? At the very least, it makes it easy for the fashion public to distinguish those with novel concepts from their peers with banal ideas.

Adrian Gan, Didi Budiardjo, Irsan and Ronald V. Gaghana were featured in A Night of Sound and Style, a fashion concerto of Harper's Bazaar Indonesia magazine, last week. The program presented individual classical, rock, disco and fashion glam categories to match the main theme with accompaniment from Magenta Orchestra.

Irsan came up with the strongest and most breathtaking ideas by presenting Gothic rock designs. His creations were not only outstanding compared with the works of the other three, but also most impressive among Indonesian designers in general, who tend to rely on chiffon and sequins as their main materials.

With pitch-black material to emphasize the Gothic tone, his collection was full of iconic elements of the U.S. Army, like epaulets on the shoulders, pouches with big buttons and double- breasted button lines.

As a surprise, he also included creations after Mondrian pop art; Irsan's designs indicated his fantasy with dramatic silhouettes and volume, extreme upper torsos and wide flairing from the waist down.

Although Irsan had prepared a set of designs several months before the event, he changed his mind and created new ones to follow his mood.

"I took 10 days to complete this collection. This is fashion, so everything is soon out (of style) when new ideas pop up," he said.

In the "Fashionista Glam" section, Adrian Gan refreshed commonplace evening wear designs. He presented a sporty look while retaining the glamor quotient by adding tight head gear to all his works, like swimmers' caps that were inseparable from the gowns. He used horizontally striped elastic material for one pattern.

Feminine designs were the main feature of Didi Budiardjo. Some of them are in fashion today, especially the distended gowns of the 1950s. But one of the designs, a corset-cum-pants combined with chiffon to enhance the halter-neck effect, should not have been featured in his collection, already passe as many of its kind had already appeared in the late 1990s.

Didi's works were far from the classical touch of Charles James, Lanvin or Elsa Schiaparelli as required in the "Clasicalista" category.

Meanwhile, Ronald V. Gaghana seemed overwhelmed by the presentations of the others, with very average designs failing to elicit a spark of interest from the audience. The energetic "Disco Diva" type he was assigned to evince was not reflected in his creations, which seemed laden down by misconceptions.

Each of his patterns contained elements already used in his previous collections, and even some reminiscent of the 2002 collection of Biyan, with whom Ronald once worked.

The designers did their utmost to live up to their designated categories but perhaps owing to the concert music, combined with the limited time to comprehend what they should have done, their works seemed incapable of translating the musical words and pushing them to the limit, except for Irsan.

Instead of allowing them to play their own symphony, they seemed trapped in an uninspired dirge. -- Syahmedi Dean