Drama. All too often it’s used as a throw-away term in fashion to describe work of a certain sweeping ilk, work that is thrilling, vivid or striking.
Elisha Quintal’s label The Butcher & The Crow could be described as dramatic, but that’s too easy an description: at it’s core it’s so much more.
‘It was never my intention to be dramatic,’ Quintal said of her flowing silk garments which waft and engulf.
‘The intention of it is to be quite subtle, because of the treatment of the fabrics and because of the high contrast between the colours and the black tends to come across as quite dramatic, especially on the catwalk.
‘But it’s not something I would personally describe it as.’
Instead, Quintal describes her collection – which was the smash hit of Perth Fashion Festival (PFF) last year – as being ‘unconventionally feminine’ and ‘darkly seductive’. Intoxicatingly romantic also works.
‘The aesthetic is predominantly quite dark, loose fitting and quite flowing and quite heavily draped.
‘So it’s still feminine without being tight or clingy or exposing bits of the body. It’s the fall of the fabric and the weight of the fabric and the movement of the fabric that makes somebody feel good in it.
‘And it’s all silk so it’s really soft and light, flowy material that just wafts around you.’
The label itself is named after a dual desire to deconstruct and pull apart (The Butcher) while reconstructing in new ways (The Crow).
‘It was sort of creating a narrative behind the label, or a narrative to follow. So it had two components: one was a hunter and the other a gatherer.
‘It was basically the idea that the consumer gets to make the garments their own by creating their own style from gathering it together and putting it together themselves.’
Wrapped up in this approach is Quintal’s love affair with the dark regions of the imagination, a slight nod to the beautiful and macabre.
‘It’s about the hidden things in the darkness, the things we don’t think about and the things we don’t particularly find beautiful or pretty.
‘But within those dark things come interjections of the light. That’s where the beauty comes from.’
Her next range, which will show at STYLEAID this July, involves Quintal’s continued use of Japanese Shibori dying techniques interjected with riveting, while layering the entire work with prints of scientific drawings, including the likes of old jaws and x-rays.
‘It’s morbid things without being morbid. It draws on the parallels between the dark and the beauty in the dark.’
Quintal, who graduated from Curtin University in 2008, was blown away by the support she received after PFF last year.
‘The response has been unexpected and slightly overwhelming, but it’s been really well received, which is good, and Perth Fashion Festival helped that a lot.
‘They got me my first stockist and then it just snowballed from there through word of mouth.’
That snowball now includes four stockists in the metro area – including Elle and Eros Clothing – plus online stocking through WA fashion portal FashionWA.com.
No doubt STYLEAID this year will expose Quintal’s label to a whole new potential fashion tribe, assuring that her work is infused with suitable theatrics without being dramatic.
STYLEAID happens Friday July 30.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
