London Fashion Week: The Beautiful Damage of Marios Schwab

Although they might not recognize today's colloquialism, the Egyptians pioneered what is now known as "body con" dressing. "Body con" is a very ancient borrowing that was buried with the Pharoahs and which the Bandage dress resurrected.

A year ago, fashion critics nudged Marios Schwab to move away from "body con" design. Body con was beginning to look dated, they said, even though they had said it in 2006 and had probably said it as far back as the Ptolemaic dynasty. Schwab responded by creating exoskeletal dresses for Spring 2008. Wrapping the body in its own frame was a way to momentarily sidestep an outmoded fashion tradition while clarifying that Schwab's extracurricular erudition would continue to play a large role in his evolution as a designer.

Both body con and that somewhat esoteric academic interest have returned for fall in what might be termed a collection of perception. This time around, it was clear that design and erudition are inseparable. The runway may be an unusual place to ponder what is sometimes found in a textbook of deviant psychology, but that's his genius. Anatomical hobby and kink, it turns out, are fine bedfellows. In Schwab's hands, the correspondence between the two is seamless and even rational. What Schwab causes is beautiful damage. You might want to think twice before meeting him in a dark alley, perhaps doubly when you realize that fatigue and concentration give Schwab the under-eye circles of Beetlejuice.

Schwab exhibited a museum of minor affliction with dresses that had been neatly vandalized and dissected (another fascination), bringing to mind not just surgery but autopsy. These ideas were morphologically articulated with the precision of a coroner. Although the distribution of the pattern varied from dress to dress, each garment was sliced in the vicinity of the colon. In one instance, the slashes made the petals of an abstract flower; in others they were burst outwards in order to show their contents.

Trespassing on Schwab's hobby took up one-third of the collection.

The other two-thirds of the collection included body con so extreme that one could see the grape that two models shared for lunch. Among this group were two well-advised pea coats and dresses with large rectangles cut from the bottom half through which one could study the physiology of immobility.

In all instances, the models were almost reduced to inaction by the tight circumference of the hems. Confinement, not dissection, was the idea upon which Schwab predicated the collection. These were hobble skirts with fetish in their pinch.

Schwab has turned in a thrillingly voyeuristic study that demands courage and a liking for risk. He's set apart by a frisson of danger, and right now there is room to maneuver. So long as his work doesn't appear to have been commissioned by the Black Dahlia murderer, it looks as if Schwab has the rare glory of being not just a creator but an inventor.