I´ve always been interested in Goth, (this is not the first time I´ve designed a gothic collection) but before starting the collection I didn´t have a clue what theme I would choose this time.
"A movement in the corner of the room!
And there is nothing I can do when I realise with fright
That the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight!.."
I am a great fan of The Cure (I went to see them in Barcelona, last march) AND I live in a semi victorian house. Why is that relevant? Well, when you live in a building which is over 200yrs old, despite cleaning and looking after the features, the wood, the furnishing.....because everything is SO old and not in such a good condition anymore, spider start doing some home-hunting. On top of that, the heating system is very good in british houses and everybody knows that spiders love to live in a quiet, dark and dry place, very far away from the british weather´s harshness....
I suddenly felt like Robert Smith in the Lullaby video. I was seeing (and I still see) spiders all over the house: in the bath, on the corner of the windows, behind the computer... All kind of sizes (tiny ones, big ones-as big as half of one of my fingers...) Sometimes I used to see something with very long and skinny legs, walking on the wood flooring gracefully as any other femme fatale.....
THE FEMME FATALE (she IS a black widow!)
As many other people, I´ve always been fascinated by the golden age of the silver screen and classic retro glamour in general. Therefore this became the second base of my collection, in fact, if you do a bit of research in fashion Gothic history, you realize that modern female goth look takes its influences from s. XIX (voluptuous figure, small waist and big hips, extremely pale skin...) A classical look that it would be carried on until the second half of the century when bikinis allowed people to go "semi-naked" to the beach and get tanned like prawns.
The black and white cinema enfasized the dramatic silouettes of the female beauties and the pallor of their skins within the b&w shadows, in fact, the make-up artist Max Factor used to apply black make-up! in order to enfasize the facial features over the whiteness of the skin. Extra-long sofisticated dresses that sticked to their bodies like gloves, re-shaped the bodies (as corsets and long skirts had done in the earlier century) making them looking evilishly beautiful and tall: the divas used to show an aparently feminine and fragile look that was semi-covering a strong, and sometimes, maquiavelic character.
Logically, all these features can be applied to the spiders, especially THE BLACK WIDOW.
Obviously a female criature, seduces, gets what she wants and then gets rid of the poor now useless male subject. As any other old fashion femme fatale, the black widow is a deep shinny black criature with a tiny waist, very voluptuous bottom and long and gracefull legs...
The perfect evil......hated, not only because she gets what she wants but because she shows to be a clever and independent being that happens to be female.... and some men still cannot swallowed the idea of being out-stripped by a woman...
During centuries, the spider has had different meanings among very different cultures. But in the western context, the spider has been linked to Treachery and Death. Seen as a "swindler" or a "destiny´s weaver", the spider has been a symbol of life (due to her ability to create webs and her fertility which has a strong sexual component) but as well, "Death" and "Destruction" because those same webs that she brought to life can take you to death. They are a trap that seem what they are not so you easily fall into them, awaiting for the monster to come for you and kill you with her poison....
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