THE 1910s: WAR & SILK

The Belle Époque ended in a specific month: August 1914. What came after was something that fashion had never been asked to navigate before, the question of what it means to dress for war, for loss, for a world that has been genuinely unmade.

The 1910s are a decade of two completely different aesthetics separated by four years of catastrophe. Before 1914: the last gasp of Edwardian elaboration, Poiret's orientalist influence, the radical silhouette experiments that were beginning to liberate the female body from the corset. After 1918: something simpler, more sober, more functional, fashion still reaching for glamour but doing it on rationed fabric and a world of reduced expectations.

The images in this series focus on the tension between those two moments: the fragile luxury of the pre-war years and the chastened utility of what came after. The silk exists because the war hasn't started yet. Or because it has ended and survival feels like something worth dressing for.