LEONARD SS2016 collection plays with colors pure and primary, yet essential, as if splashed
across a blank canvas. A spontaneous expression. Transparencies and opacities.
A false ingenuousness, a real nonchalance. The candor, the energy of color. The collection brings together an engaging visual extravaganza that showcases a seamless convergence between
traditional printing technique and intensive Pop Art graphics. The collection is a clever reinterpretation of the
signature prints by translating the elusive inspiration to the vibrant graphics
of colors and words. Pure and contrasting, the color story is meticulous thought
over like painter’s palette and hand applied on silk.
Designer plays with historic Leonard Paris house prints. She draws them from the archives like an artist constructing his palette, with innocent and acid nuances. She breaks them down, creates false accidents, and unveils them under a silk and nylon organza. Butterfly wings are blown up and resized to become a luminous abstract detail: a tear of yellow on a blue background. The Leonard Paris signature band brings a graphic rigor to the obscure. Like one clean line. The color archive of the brand is home to thousands of hues, each given a specific name and arranged according to mysterious yet traditional criteria that passed down from generation to generation. The Leonard Paris workshop follows the sternest standards from sketching to the crucial process of hand printing, which uses up to 30 colored silkscreens in order to create a realistic representation of flowers. Such a complicated process is nothing less than the purest form of artistic creation.
Flowing jumpsuits printed in a repetitive motif with different variants, à la Andy Warhol are the key look in this colection. The traditional Leonard Paris prints play in a recursive, almost Droste effect. Structured jacquards and dresses with appended words, motifs and pure colors, recall the lacerated posters of Jacques Villéglé. Ample skirts are paired with cropped tops and white jackets that give the illusion of having been naively decorated with marker scribble, but are actually printed with an original archive motif. A luxury for the everyday. The evening goes out in the day versus a day that lives during the night. Joyful sophistication. An unshakable confidence. Words, images, collages. The nervous vitality of the artist’s stroke. Original joy. The power of the instantaneous. David Hockney comes to mind, his ability to seize an instant, as we gaze upon a color block dress or a trench coat with eel skin pockets in cobalt blue. There is something of this in the Leonard SS16 collection by Yiqing Yin: seizing the instant, translating this into a playful expression of color and words.
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