Valencia Fashion Week

Esther Noriega

COLLECTION EUMÉNIDES

PROLOGUE Erinias was the term they used in the old Greece to name the goddesses of the revenge. Its meaning was “persecution", since their mission was to chase and punish the crimes. Later, the Greeks began to use a euphemism: EUMÉNIDES, whose meaning was "benevolent".

The EUMÉNIDES are primitive forces preceding the Olympians, so they do not submit to the authority of Zeus, King of the Gods. They are goddesses, belonging to the land, but they live the underworld and just come back to it in order to punish the crimes and their authors, chasing them until they go them mad.

The goddesses of the revenge were three sisters: ALECTO, the implacable one, punished the moral crimes; MEGÉREA, the jealous one, punished the crimes of infidelity and envy; and TISÍFONE: the avenging of the murder, who did that with the violent crimes. They represent the honesty of the things inside the established order; they are the protectors of the cosmos opposite to the chaos, that’s why the Olympians feel repulsion towards them, a mixture of respect and reverential fear.

The human beings are simply afraid and escape from them.

The EUMÉNIDES are fair, but they do not have piety. Neither nothing nor nobody can prevent that they carry out their vindictive task and their tortures only stop if the criminal finds someone who purifies his crimes.

A collection based on party dresses , where across different forms, colors and fabrics it is represented from the most terrible and darkest side of the Goddesses of the Revenge, up to the most benevolent. EUMÉNIDES is inspired in the Old Greece, of which it is reflected the gauzy and fall of the fabrics and the different textures and the pleats of the period, whose aim was to mark and suggest the silhouette of the woman. The leather is the main character, and it is present in smooth and brocade. The smooth involves the most elaborated dresses, created with leather strips plaited on mannequin, giving by this way the form to the body. They are dresses with many working hours, created with just traditional methods. The brocade leather stands out in some bodies and in the details of belts and flowers that decorate dresses and tops.

Another of the used fabrics are gauze, silk cheesecloth, knit, crepe, tulle, lace … all of them are textiles with hang and transparencies. It stands out the mixture of all of them, the knit with the leather, the cheesecloth with the silk, with the crepe … creating different textures.

The coloring is related to the colors that were used in the Old Greece: white, purple, red, gold and black. The white was the most common and the cheapest, since it was expensive to dye the fabrics. The purple was born by the important magistrates and it denoted a high position in the society. This color was extracted of the "murex", a mollusk used to obtain this color, and it was very costly to do it.

The red one was the color used in the triumphal parades after an important battle. The gold, or blond, was the color that everybody aspired, and they used it to obtain a blond coloration in the hair. Aphrodite, the goddess of the beauty and love has been and will always be blond. The black is the color in which the EUMÉNIDES are represented.

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