Opening your Paris debut show with Naomi Campbell, closing it with Paloma Elsesser and setting it in an ornate ballroom at the Shangri-La hotel is certainly hard to top. It’s no surprise that all eyes turned to Torishéju’s sophomore show in Paris on Tuesday afternoon. Instead of succumbing to the pressure surrounding his SS25 collection, the British-Nigerian-Brazilian designer embraced a vision of contemporary chaos to shape his garments.
The eponymous label titled the collection The Ship of Fools, drawing inspiration from a medieval painting by Hieronymus Bosch that depicts social collapse. Dominated by ample-shouldered silk tailcoats, forking dresses and petticoats paired with bloomers, the runway envisioned a decadent aristocracy aboard a sinking ship.
As the music intensified, the collection began to bear the marks of wreckage – unfussy draping lay loose, raw hems were exposed and sheer fabrics floated around the body. Torishéju mimicked the flawed cork-buoyancy-vests from the Titanic by stuffing the translucent outer layers of sheer dresses and skirts with balled clusters of offcuts. These ballooning hemlines that once danced around the body, now appeared drowned by an abstract overflow of water.
The designer brought that same opulence and visually undone quality to the evening looks – crinkled silk, maxi dresses in ivory and black and tartan bloomers layered under micro-mini skirts
The SS25 Torishéju collection was created off the back of the designer’s custom work for Zendaya as part of the Dune: Part Two press tour and having The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquire his capsule collection, Mami Wata, for its Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibition. Having also received support from Diego Della Valle and The Virgil Abloh Foundation, it’s clear that the avant-garde brand is sailing safely through the waves of the fashion industry. Watch it soar.
Photography courtesy of Torishéju.
torishéju.com
