Editor’s Pick: Laison by Aurelia Santoso Spring 2016. The collection are defined by tailoring precision and proportion play, with emphasis on attitude, imperfection, and sophisticated ease.
Translating modernity and versatile pieces in ready-to-wear collection, is a particular challenge for any designer in Indonesia, which is still largely focused on custom designs. Production and maintaining the quality is a constraint. There, most designers disrupted to develop a continuous process for creating a sustainable collection, especially to meet a market demand in the era of fast fashion industry. However, there is a refreshing phase in last few years, new generation began to emerge, a strong, up-and-coming force to be reckoned with in the industry due to their design qualities. One of them is called ‘LAISON’ created by Aurelia Santoso. This new label could embodies the complexity of the needs of today’s modern woman through their inspired use of elongated silhouettes, relaxed tailoring, quality fabrics and innovative designs.
Established in 2014, LAISON has offered unique philosophies and processes that run deeper than just following seasonal trends. This is confirmed by LAISON’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection entitled “Memento”, where Aurelia took the notion of impermanence as the main concept. Inspired by the architecture of Pompeii, its tiles and ingenious rock, the collection are defined by tailoring precision and proportion play, with emphasis on attitude, imperfection, and sophisticated ease. Something compelling from this collection are the intangible elements in Aurelia’s work, where cut and seam reflected the fragility and imperfection of woman that she wanted to manifest although still intertwined with the opulence through the fabrics. She literally cut meaning into her clothes.
The beauty of its design lies in the process when Aurelia tried to find a new way to explore the beauty of it’s own, which in this case was born out of ‘tragedy’. The collection emphasise on details and embellishment by utilising beads with cracking textures and embroidered prints referred to the forgotten Pompeii’s tragedy. After all, this collection is intended to express her fascination of decay as being just as wonderful and rich as an expression of life. Through the juxtaposition of handcrafted textures, she designing this new collection of one-of-a-kind garments as a state of accepting the imperfections and appreciating them as beautiful and complex. Looking at Memento, you can see the multiple layers of history they all have. (Text Teuku Ajie)
See the complete collection below:
LAISON by Aurelia Santoso Spring 2016 ‘Memento’ is now available at Ara Jakarta, Galeries Lafayette Jakarta, Roxalne Bali and Raffles Privato Singapore.