VoxFrocker Paris Williment’s thoughtful critique of MFW’s “Opulent Tastes” runway is both love-letter and lament about the contradictory ways “luxury” is defined by fashion. Scroll down to meet your VoxFrock Rookie Crew and click back daily here and here for MFW updates by fashion’s future journalists and photographers.
Words: Paris Williment Photos: Theadora Violet
Opulence: the happy marriage between unabashed pretentiousness and absolute luxury. If successful, opulence can be theatrical, spectacular, ostensibly proving your prestige in the eyes of your audience.
If opulence fails, it can mutate into camp classic pageantry. So there really is no losing with a runway like Opulent Tastes, especially enjoyed over a beautiful sit-down dinner at Il Mercato Centrale, busy with busboys exclusively tasked with serving oysters.
The target demographic is clear, the intention is set, and while trying to evoke opulence with a garment is undeniably painstaking, expensive, and requires expert craftsmanship and design, it is at least conceptually straightforward.
Yet somehow the Opulent Tastes runway defied my expectations. I went in looking for the sumptuous and the lavish and left only with philosophical quandaries. (I’m so tired of doing that; it happens all the time.)
The brief for this runway was reportedly opulence not for the “elite”, but the “culturally elite”. Maybe this contributed to my confusion, as the philosophical thread between “culture” and “elites” kept snapping every time I tried to connect them.
With my blunted Occam’s razor, I decided that “culturally elite” meant opulent fashion for cool rich people and, much to my delight, a few labels really came through.
Designer Gary Bigeni painted the first vivid opulent fantasy of the show, a collection fit for a carbon-offset yacht party in the Whitsundays.
Clair Helen offered up a sickly sweet confection of looks that made my heart sing (specifically, Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’).
Perple always pleases me, as does Saint Stella M who struck ostentatious notes of colour, technique and silhouette.
It’s not that the offerings were boring, but it is obvious to me, true opulence is fading. And perhaps, little wonder. These are not the Roaring 2020’s after all: there are fewer lavish parties within castle walls to distract from the grating sound of the poor rioting outside.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the fantasies of the so-called “elite” have become so aesthetically safe. Perhaps “quiet luxury” has taken terminal hold over the glamourous old markers of opulence. We could spend a day discussing the whys, but a more interesting question is, are we at peace with opulence being made so aesthetically minimal or, at worst, ordinary?
Meet the VoxFrockers
Paris Williment, journalist
Paris is a professional makeup artist, a mother and also describes themself as, “a grifter with a fascination as to how beauty serves the individual and the unique interpretations by the eyes of its beholder”. Born and raised in Queensland with a decade of theatre, vintage furs and a MAC Pro Membership up their sleeve, Paris hopes “they might finally write about it”. This is Paris’s second tour on the VoxFrock Rookie Crew.
Theadora Violet, Photographer/Crew mentor
