Psychedelic acid lobsters on ivory gowns; pagan headgears and references ranging from South-American idols to Japanese  robots and dances (Butoh especially); embroidered swans as the ultimate symbol of the Apollonian poet… It is with this collection more than any other that Tisci shows how he diverted from his past aesthetic, mostly evoking ages of darkness, the tumults of Christianity and, generally,  a more Dionysian approach. The extraordinary skeletal bird-motifs are layered both in vivid pastel colours and in multiple hues of white. Sheerness emphasizes the beauty of the -robotic- movement of these delicate origamis, adorned by hundreds and hundreds of precious details. Thus the woman can metamorphose into a swan or a solar deity, going back to her status of muse of the poet. Alexander McQueen has already brought birds (almost obsessively) as the uncanny inspiration for many collections, but Tisci has found a new territory with the light and serene beauty expressed by his creations. All in all a display of poetic virtuosity and an ode to beauty.

Stone of Axayacatl, depicting Tonatiuh, Atzec solar god

…And it is certainly not a coincidence that Riccardo Tisci picks the swan to illustrate his virtuosity; a theme that was already crucial thousands years ago in one of the most famous odes by Horace.

“No vulgar wing, nor weakly plied,
Shall bear me through the liquid sky;
A two-form’d bard, no more to bide
Within the range of envy’s eye
‘Mid haunts of men. I, all ungraced
By gentle blood, I, whom you call
Your friend, Maecenas, shall not taste
Of death, nor chafe in Lethe’s thrall.
E’en now a rougher skin expands
Along my legs: above I change
To a white bird; and o’er my hands
And shoulders grows a plumage strange:
Fleeter than Icarus, see me float
O’er Bosporus, singing as I go,
And o’er Gaetulian sands remote,
And Hyperborean fields of snow;
By Dacian horde, that masks its fear
Of Marsic steel, shall I be known,
And furthest Scythian: Spain shall hear
My warbling, and the banks of Rhone.
No dirges for my fancied death;
No weak lament, no mournful stave;
All clamorous grief were waste of breath,
And vain the tribute of a grave.”

Horace, Ode 2.20