Matières Fécales Dissects Power on the Runway: “The One Percent”
We are all well aware that the world is rapidly cracking at the seams. A world controlled by a handful of people, often at the expense of everyone else. A small circle of power. And while fashion has never needed bold expression and political urgency more than it does now, much of the industry seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Safety has become brands’ dominant strategy. When profit is the priority, risk is the first thing to disappear. But not for Matières Fécales. Since their very first collection, Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran have refused to follow the script. They’ve been writing their own.“The One Percent” is exactly what it sounds like. The call out of the 1%. The show unfolded in three tableaux, each representing a stage of power: the archetypes, community, and the power of the future.
The opening tableau introduced the bourgeois family, setting the tone. Mothers, fathers, and the daughters, twisted the codes of upper-class elegance and the polished yet distorted glamour of a bygone time. Many of them were wearing white gloves with red palms titled “Guilt Gloves” symbolizing the blood on their hands.
Accessories became instruments of suffocation: Lola von Flame wore an enormous pearl necklace wrapped around her head, with a giant pearl lodged in her mouth as a grotesque symbol of insatiable greed. Money appeared everywhere. Shirts declaring “I love power”, eye masks shaped like dollar bills, as characters are literally being blinded with money. A textured 3D knit, entirely knotted from cash, paired with tweedy black capris and prim satin heels. Instead of handcuffs, their hands were tied with pearl necklaces.
One of the show’s most striking details was the characters’ painful obsession with beauty, set against the quiet brutality of elitism. With prosthetics designed by Alexis Stone, these beauty fixations were presented through plastic surgery marks, band-aids, scars, reflecting the pain as the price of beauty and youth – one thing they can never attain.
The second tableau represents the power of community. Since their debut, Matières Fécales has often been called a Cult Brand. Contrasting the bourgeois and going against the norms, models were wearing all-black jersey hoodie capes with elongated kangaroo pockets, some stamped simply with the word “Cult.”. Hannah and Steven chose their friends and family such as Jenna Marvin, Parma Ham, Leo Monira, to walk the runway, as they often feel powerless in the conservative times we’re living in.
At last, came “The Immortals”. The power of the future. Led by Hannah herself in a reimagined “New Look” - white albino python cocoon skirt suit in designers’ signature silhouette with heelless skin boots morphing into her legs. This tableau shows that the 1% have access to tools of life that most of us don’t, yet they don’t use it to enhance their outer shell. Longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, known for investing in anything that buys him more time, walked beside Hannah and Steven’s “Parisian mother”, the force, Michèle Lamy, who refuses to hide her age, embracing her natural beauty. She wore a warped wool-knit dress with ash-grey goat-fur sleeves, turning her appearance into an iconic performance. Debra Shaw closed the show in a piece designers originally drew years ago, as the take on the ultimate power silhouette: the Elizabethan queen.
“This story of power comes to an end and as we have seen in history time after time, too much power can eclipse our humanity. Perhaps that’s why we aren’t born gods.” – said Hannah and Steven in their show notes.
The show unsettled, provoked, questioned, leaving many uneasy. But hasn’t society been living in discomfort all along?
Words: Sara Vukosavljevic