Charlie Le Mindu Burka Curfew SS12 from Charlie Le Mindu on Vimeo.
Charlie Le Mindu has a celebrity clientele most beauty brands would pay millions for, and cult fashion connections with many of the best in the business.
The hairdresser-come-designer is known for his ability to craft dresses from tresses. Working almost exclusively in real human hair, he creates lavish headdresses, wigs and gowns that have the kind of movement and bounce one would normally associate with a Pantene commercial. Yet, at the French native's debut show at Paris Fashion Week (he's previously presented in London), publicity was limited.
This is because, despite creating costumes for Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kelis, Drew Barrymore, Peaches and the Victoria and Albert museum, to name but a few, Charlie Le Mindu's work is something very rare in an industry that exhaustively digs for novelty whilst simultaneously attempting to generate the highest levels of profit possible; it is legitimately and unflinchingly provocative.
His SS12 outing 'Burka Curfew' had an inspiration that was automatically unsettling, made more so by the fact that nudity is a forgone conclusion in a Le Mindu presentation. There were certainly a few cringe-inducing details, like a monobrowed beauty look, and a sheer black Niqāb through which rosebud nipples poked pointedly like a second set of eyes, but overall, the range erred so on the side of camp, odalisque-idolising orientalism that it felt near a-political, despite its hot-button theme.
In choosing a topic that so clearly courted controversy, the designer did himself a disservice, because that theme draws attention away from the most fertile aspect of Le Mindu's practice - the way he subverts the natural instincts of disgust and desire.
This season, Le Mindu partnered with Minx nails creating costumes out of scarab-shiny claws, sewn so closely they resembled lizard scales. This new addition rounded out his keratin construction portfolio, and felt particularly uncomfortable when applied to a high waisted g-string.
The by-products of the body trigger a natural sense of repulsion in people, and it is these off-cast organics (or Minx's artificial approximation of the same) that Le Mindu deals in. What is impressive about his work is that, although you are aware that his headdresses, swishing cocktail gowns and flouncing fishtails are human-grown, and for that reason inevitably skeevey, it is difficult to deny that, thanks to their rich jewel colours and light-catching lustre, his pieces are pretty, well, pretty.
Le Mindu is often accused of attention seeking. That the human body is the major manufacturer of Le Mindu's raw material offers justification for the designer's significant reliance on nudity in his shows. His theme, however, is less defensible.
At its best, Charlie Le Mindu's work stands out like Rossy de Palma, the woman who closed his show. It is unconventional and challenges our preconceived notions of what is beautiful, what is acceptable and what is alluring. Whether 'Burka Curfew' represented a successful scaling of this summit is open for debate.