Haute Couture Color

Photos Credits Valério Mezzanotti

Originally a hair stylist,  Charlie Le Mindu, has forged a career in fashion out of ever shocking, weird, and over the top design.  The 26-year-old,  Bordeaux-born, London-based designer pairs unusual materials, flamboyant colors, and prolific wigs with a studied knowledge and faith based in the lessons of fashion past.  He says "In this day and age, maybe because of grunge and all that, people think it's sexy to look like a mess. And it is. But sometimes we need to look to the past. Not copy it, but just take it as an example."

Photos Credits Valério Mezzanotti

In collaboration with latex design house Très Bonjour,  Le Mindu splashed onto a black lit runway at this years Paris Fashion Week. His Spring/Summer 2014 collection was titled Luminescent. Using synthetic hair that glows florescent under black light his show lit up the runway with a rave of colors rarely seen in every day life. The collection is something of mermaid punk mash up with jellyfish-like tentacles and gravity defying shapes  that float down the run way. 

Le Mindu grew up the child of a Spanish Gypsy and a French Drag King in the wilds backstage as his mother performed at gay night clubs in France. After an introduction to hair dressing in the French country side,  Le Mindu moved to Berlin at  age 17 where he was soon cutting hair in a different Drag club every night and developing his signature wigs.  From there he moved to East London and continued to style hair while developing his own cheveux-centric fashion line in 2009. 

His catwalk shows, far from being presentational, liberate fashions inner monsters and lets them prowl down the run way in livid abandon. Haute Couture, much like Fine Art, is often criticized or glanced over by others for being useless, self indulgent, or posh. But even if they are all those things they are also inspiring, exploratory and experimental. His color choices are too extreme for many, and few but Lady Gaga would wear his work out on the street, but just because his work is wild and pleasantly deviant doesn't mean all the lessons learned from pieces need be applied whole hock.   The experimentation,  especially to these extremes, can help us find solutions to design problems faced in other fields. 

Exposure to design outside our comfortable zone of useful and everyday also exposes us to materials and colors we might not have considered before. The colors are both highly visible and full of energy. So what application can you think up for one of these unusual materials in other areas? How could these colors influence one of your projects? Lets us know below!