If 2015 is the year when there is a pair of shredded jeans into every girl’s wardrobe, that’s thanks to Marques’Almeida brand. From the beginning of their brand, Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida wanted to follow their own path, having as a benchmark what they think “street fashion” is, even if this thought was, in the beginning, way too far from what young Londoners perceived. Super-shredded denim instead of pretty party-dresses was and remains their trend. The persistence in this trend, away from any kind of luxury, is vindicated perfectly by the innumerable Marques’Almeida pieces on the Fashion Week crowds, and, also, by the great influence they had on mainstream manufacturing. That’s why the warehouse in North London, where their last collection was presented, was full of the international fashion’s elite.
Ruffles and transparency were the new entries on their latest show’s collection, always, though, adapted to the destroyed-street glamour that characterizes the fashion house. So, there were ruffle-fronted but raw-edged shirts, roughly chopped into dense halter-bibs, and flounces running across sheer chiffon or down into shaggy-fringed denim skirts. The combination of the designers’ latin temperament with their generation’s (‘90s) attitude, had a unique result, as always. And even if this Portuguese couple started taking on new fabrics – slubby-beige linen and burlap and working in a crackly-surfaced patent leather and chocolate brown suede – showing a tendency towards romanticism, their persistence remains on showing what’s already successful: shredded jeans, oversized biker jackets and halters. And as Marta often says, the benchmark of every collection is whether her 22-year-old sister likes it and whether her peers can afford it.
