Kazakhstan-based fashion house InClover is back at Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week for a fourth time with a distinctive take on one of fashion’s most glamorous styles.
When you think of high fashion, it is hard not to think of Paris, France, especially when it comes time for the renowned Paris Fashion Week, and every notable fashion designer has the event circled on their calendars years in advance. But you probably don’t first think of Kazakhstan, a landlocked country situated mostly in Central Asia. While it is the world’s ninth largest nation in size, it is home to only 20.6 million people, making it one of the least-populated nations in the world.
But Kazakhstan is where noted fashion designer Gaziza Shabdarbayeva founded the fast-rising InClover fashion brand in 2008. InClover began as a bespoke atelier before evolving into a couture brand with an emphasis on feminine, complex silhouettes and meticulous handwork. The much- heralded Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week is the perfect showcase for InClover’s distinctive and modern take on the bold beauty of the famed Baroque style of high fashion, which has been admired for centuries and in many ways defines historical French fashion.
For InClover’s fourth show in Paris it is showing its Baroque Reverie collection, which combines the seemingly incompatible — the minimalism of modern clothing in both its simplicity and pure form and the excesses and flourishes that are trademarks of the Baroque style.
Baroque is often called the height of femininity, a style in which beauty is elevated to its emotional peak — think of glamourous ladies in expansive and flowing ballgowns languidly fanning themselves as harpsichord music tinkles in the background in a grandiose candlelit evening ballroom aglitter with gold and mirrors.
InClover is a brand that has been exploring the nature of the evening gown since its founding nearly twenty years ago, so exploring and pushing the boundaries of the Baroque style today makes perfect sense and fits with InClover’s core identity.
However, this new Baroque Reverie collection is not about quoting or simply duplicating a historical era but is rather an attempt to reinterpret its distinctive language through contemporary fashion, while avoiding some of the errors other Baroque-inspired designers have made in the past.
“I understood that perhaps the main mistake when working with Baroque is to reproduce it too literally,” says Shabdarbayeva. “Baroque, as interpreted by InClover, is not golden curls and theatrics for the sake of theatrics. The goal was to retain the very idea of luxury, drama and excess from a historical style and apply it to a contemporary form.”
Paris Fashion Week, which first began in October 1973, has since become a series of designer presentations held semi-annually in the spring and autumn, and is one of the Big Four fashion weeks along with New York, Milan and London. In addition to Paris’s ready-to-wear shows, there are men’s and haute couture shows. The term “haute couture” itself is French, literally meaning “high sewing” or “high dressmaking,” and referred originally to a type of aristocratic garment common in Europe during the 16th to the 18th century and to the upper portion of a dress as distinguished from the skirt and sleeves. To say the French own haute couture is not an exaggeration: the term is defined by the Paris Chamber of Commerce and protected by French law.
To participate as haute couturiers fashion houses must meet certain criteria — one requirement is to produce at least 35 unique looks per year, including both day and evening wear. Only a few houses are able to meet this requirement, which leaves very few of them able to participate in haute couture fashion shows. This makes the Kazakhstan-based InClover’s fourth Paris show even more impressive.
The house’s foundation is based upon custom tailoring that provides not only artisanal legitimacy but also “atelier expertise,” an understanding of fit, showcasing the skills required in complex construction, and the ability to work with actual female bodies, not just lifting images off a screen.
Baroque’s influence in this new collection is manifested not just in the decoration and fabrics used, but in the overall sense of lavish form, resulting in a style that is more Baroque than a hundred golden curls.
As leading-edge fashion designers who live and work in a sparsely populated Central Asian nation and yet are showing their triumphal creations at the Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week, InClover’s distinctive take on the bold and beautiful Baroque style is yet another real-world proof of one of life’s most trusted axioms: You never really know where the next great idea will come from.
