Susana Bettencourt Catwalk Fashion Show Amsterdam SS16

The SS16-collection is the beginning of a new cycle for Susana and this one’s the first of another four chapters. And also a new start to experiment with new fabrics and techniques without losing her solid signature. “For me it was about how I can keep on developing my work, but people can still see in a second that this is me.” It resulted in her familiar lace techniques and knitwear details, but with a new embossing technique. The collection is build around the way we see the world. How can we all have so different views? “The first book you get to read on Central Saint Martins is about the human body anatomy and especially the eye. So I totally got involved in that, explored every bit of it, as close as I could to the pupil, the colours and even the whole structure of the vains and translated this to my designs.”

Remarkable this time was the absence of colour and ethical details, something we have seen a lot in all her previous collections. “This time I wanted to keep it really simple and clean, so I’ve chosen white as main colour. The ethical detail was mainly in the white paint around the eyes.”

To understand the path taken by Susana as a fashion designer, we need to go back a few years and travel to the Azores in Portugal, where her passion for knitwear and traditional lace techniques were developed from early in her childhood. Relocating to London, to undertake a BA in Fashion Knitwear at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Susana continued to hone her knitwear and women’s wear skills and translated her sculptural designs into the dimension of seamless knitwear. She explores the boundaries between technology and hand-crafting knitwear techniques, developing the jacquard to the extreme in order to make textures and volume in detail. And it got her pretty far. Her signature collections have won over fans the whole world over, including pop diva Lady Gaga. Will it also in Holland? As Plato once said, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In that case, she did a pretty good job tonight.

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