This year's edition of Moda Lisboa- Lisbon Fashion Week was very special, and not only because of its twentieth anniversary. The other thing which made this Fashion Week even more interesting and incredible was LAB.
LAB - from laboratory, was cycle of the shows, where young, underground and more avant garde designers had chance to show their collections. And these designers were: Os Burgueses, Jianhui Yan/Lara with his organic jewellery collection, Saymyname, Ricardo Andrez, Daniel Dinis, Marques' Almeida and V!tor. All of them had something really interesting to show. Although between all the professional designers there was someone really special- V!tor.
Vitor Bastos is a very hot name in portuguese fashion right now. He's only 25 and he is quite established for such a young designer.
The forms of his clothing are very casual and sporty, but the whole mystery of his success is in the colours and art of connecting different fabrics together. And apparently, in choice of collaboraters. For his spring/summer collection, Vitor decided to work with the iconic pen company BIC. With the development of the jewellery line, that actually interprets the object of the company, he created Silver Cristal Celebrate Necklaces and joint it within the event of commermoration of the 60th anniversary of the iconic BIC Cristal. The other collaborater for this season was Adidas, who prepared entire shoe line just for the Vitor.
The collection „RROM”, presented for the first time at Moda Lisboa, is the effect of designer's long research on gypsy communities over the world. The necessity of the personification, which usually is not explored during the designing, led the development of the collection and all the media that involves it, to connect the author with the development of the whole process.
Vitor's collection is a very young and fresh mix of sporty casual style and fashion avant-garde. He can easly play with colours creating something original and unexpected.
The big plus of his work is unisex and very universal character , clothes can be worn by teenagers and 30 years old, girls and boys. Vitor used for this collection fabrics from his own clothing and mixed them with constructed interpretation of the self, concerning the gypsyness of his own life and lifestyle.That's what makes his work so true and so „his”
When he designs, he doesn't pretend to be someone else, he also doesn't really care about this season trends, he's like second year student, who follow his heart and uses whole his creativity to make something special. And the result is very rich variety of colours, textures and fabrics collection. Clothes actually seem to have the story behind them. They also have the retro, old-school feeling, for example the mens half pink half stripy blezer, yellow-orange-green t-shirt or even backpack, which looks like it was sewn from pieces of different fabrics with the V!tor's label remind colorful 1980s.
The designer also doesn't risk with silhuettes, it is similar to his own image, which is quite smooth „V” shape, although most of his propositions are quite loose.
Plus of this collection was its unisex character. With today's trend for male models looking like women and women looking like men, the show was very in fashion, because sometimes it was really hard to distinguish females and males.
Pieces presented by boys could absolutely be worn by girls. But at the same time, it's not something like Andriey Pejic presenting wedding dress at Jean Paul Gaultier's show.
Vitor already in the process of designing knows, that his piece will be worn by both sexes.
That was also one of the reasons, why his collection was absolutely like a fresh air in the room.
Watching V!tor work we can easly assume, that designer had really good fun creating the his fashion. Very important point of this collection were also shoes.
V!tor presentation was so different not only from designers showing in the main location, but also from LAB team. Other designers showing through LAB, created very original, constructive and unsuspected pieces, while V!tor decided to go for this kind of ready-to-wear, casual looks and just playing with the colours and fabrics.
All the models were wearing Vitor's jewellery design created in collaboration with BIC. Silver, star-shaped pens became the main and probably the most fashionable accessorie during the whole Fashion Week and I wouldn't be surprised if one day, I would see them in stores. And this is the magic thing about Vitor. He creates amazing things from simple objects, necklaces from pens, creations from old clothes, his creativity wins with the budget possibilities. Vitor as a designer and a human is very inspirational, because he shows, that if you really wants something, you can achieve it, no matter what. Just follow your heart.
