Paris-ALSharqiya, August 19: Mystery, suspense, and excitement... Three elements that enable you as you follow the show of the international Saudi designer, Muhammad Ashi, for the fall and winter of 2023-2024. This was the last day of Haute Couture week in Paris. He chose for him the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet and an atmosphere enveloped in a curtain of excitement in which black and white intertwined with some quiet earthy colors, and its suspense and mystery was enhanced by smoke emanating from the ground to make you feel at one moment as if the models were walking on the clouds, not on the ground.

The more looks, the greater the element of suspense and drama. One picture begins to appear before your eyes, which is that behind the cuts created by the designer's scissors and his fertile imagination, there are stories that connect imagination with reality in an innovative way. Ashi is known for his passion for literature and all kinds of arts. Sometimes he draws inspiration from them or scoops them up at another time to formulate designs that give women an aesthetic that serves them.

It was no different this time. Only the dose was stronger, perhaps because he knew in advance that attention would be directed to him this season more than any previous season. Here, for the first time, he is a welcome guest in the official program of the French Federation of "Haute Couture", as the first Saudi to join it.

Indeed, Ashi explains that this collection, entitled "Essence", meaning the essence, seeks to "extract beauty from the depths and bring it outward." It is a "dark love" story - as he points out - that was inspired by the novel "Perfume" by Patrick Suskind. A novel published in 1985, and its events take place in the 18th century in the spaces of Paris, Auvergne, Montpellier, and the French capital of perfumes, Grasse. It deals with many contradictions and dualities in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense.

The protagonist of the novel, Jean-Baptiste Gronoy, is inhabited by a fondness for perfumes, and has reached an obsession that controls all his behavior and his view of others. For him, human life is worth nothing compared to a unique fragrance. This obsession made him a strange personality driven by many contradictions. On the one hand, he loves beauty and appreciates the love and tranquility that distinct scents evoke, and on the other hand, he lacks any moral or human scruples to the extent that everything is trivialized in the search for this distinction.

Muhammad Ashi took from the hero his passion for beauty and his search for excellence, and translated them into feminine designs that may play on duality and contradictions, but with surprising harmony.

What you touch in this lineup for the upcoming fall and winter is its ability to redraw non-material concepts such as memory and longing and embody them in elegant fashion that leaves in the mind the effect of the fragrance that may never disappear. Ashi, like a perfumer haunted by the desire to discover new materials and flowers and extract their juices with advanced techniques, has been searching for basics, or, as he put it, “extracting the essence inherent in the concept of haute couture” to come up with designs that move women from day to evening smoothly, gaining tyrannical femininity without vulgarity.

His tools to achieve this recipe are coarse fabrics and other soft and transparent fabrics that make them dance with each other in delicious harmony, relying on architectural engineering concepts that are embodied in large sizes, and this is normal and expected of him by virtue of the fact that the late Cristobal Balenciaga was and still is his ideal, in addition to his play on that duality Lined between luxury and calm, between sensual excitement and sophisticated femininity. It may look as if Ashi has ditched his outer layer, but you discover that he used meters of silk organza to camouflage and create optical illusions.

He also used innovative links that tie the design together, such as a look in which the model appears in a hood covering the head, while the arms and legs were revealed through a high opening. Another look in which the transparent tulle undulates in a silhouette that surrounds the body and follows its contours. As if this boldness was not enough, the waist was narrowed and defined to evoke the shape of a perfume bottle. As for another dress, he directed it for evening and evening, and it was dominated by folds from the origami art that Ashi always returns to, and he explained that it was “made of 150 meters of fabric, and molded in a way that represents a half-full perfume bottle. Playing on thick and transparent is also present here.

As for the net that was used in it from velvet, it is in fact a thin drawing that represents grass.” To take us back to the point from which he started, namely perfumes, explaining that the herb was not the only one trying to remind us of the perfume industry and its impact on this collection, “the embroidery, beads and copper threads that were used also refer to the tools used in the perfume industry.”

And since Muhammad Ashi does not usually drown in embroidery and relies on shapes and sizes in return, he used embroidery here with great caution, so that the result is balanced. Even in the group of dresses destined for evening and evening, the glamor was in very calculated doses to the extent that it did not raise the eye compared to other details such as a bare back in a dress and another with pleats at the chest that look like huge rose petals in which the waist appears slender to expand like a blown corset, from which a transparent layer hangs up to the earth. All this to enhance the designer's vision, which is based on making the hidden and the exposed one, and creating a smooth, yet "threatening" sense of drama.