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What happened at Valmont Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week 2019?
30th April 2019 - Aina Matamoros
Last week Barcelona hosted the Valmont Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week with great success. This event gets bigger and bigger every year, with more brands and designers showing their bridal collections in this amazing city.
I am “lucky” to work at XXL Comunicación, the PR and Communications agency than manages all the national and international press guests, as well as the post coverage, and also organizes the biggest events of the week, such as the Bridal Night or the Elle International Bridal Awards.
As the head of press eating, I am the one that has to be in all of the shows, not necessarily stay for all of them, though. So you can imagine I end the week being pretty fed up with seeing white wedding dresses and colorful evening gowns. Like we at our office always say: if you want to get married, DO NOT WORK AT VBBFW ;) However, I also get to compare all the collections and I see which ones are the best, in my opinion. This being the third year I worked on the event, I think I got quite good at Bridal Fashion Knowledge and I feel confident talking about it.
In this post, I would like to list my the collections that I think made a difference or pointed out among the other ones.
1. Jesús Peiró
This Catalan, Barcelona made, brand, founded more than 30 years ago, opened the event setting a pretty high standard. Designed by Merche Segarra, the firm’s style is clean and polished. It can be identified by the lightness of its pieces, even those with large volumes of fabric.
The bridal collection for 2020 is called CALA and it is mainly inspired by the beauty and uniqueness of one flower: the lily. Its shape and characteristics are the ideas on which the designer based each bridal gown: its elegance, its delicate, yet firm, texture, and its unruly sobriety… It is all an expression of femininity. Usually subtle, sometimes voluminous, but it is always light and brings the purest whiteness to the dresses and the brides for 2020. (Pure Bride White is back and everyone is here for it. No more weird colorful bridal gowns, please.)
However, white is almost the only super traditional characteristic left to Jesús Peiró’s dresses. The brand presented modern brides wearing pants, capes, jumpsuits, coats, shirts, and veils topped with a rounded little hat (as if they were flight attendants). There were also beautiful dresses that went from the ones showing minimal shapes and made with light fabrics to the ones showing very voluminous shapes in the skirts and sleeves and made with heavy fabrics. There was no in-between. But all of them followed this same line of a new bride, a daring, modern and very stylish bride that is here to kill it and slay in their wedding day feeling really herself.
2. The Atelier by Jimmy Choo
So it appears that shoe designer Jimmy Choo has also a bridal collection since 2015! And it was the best surprise of the week. Some of his dresses were my favorites and he was personally there.
The Atelier presented its 2020 collection taking inspiration from surrealist art as its main theme. The designer has chosen playful surrealist features and designed a series of dream-like fantasy wedding dresses (one of them in blue which looked like Elsa’s dress, from Frozen), using three-dimensional cutting and embroidered beads to create texture and color, as well as folds and many other magical and strange artistic effects.
As said, the princess ball gowns were the stars of the collection but Jimmy Choo also left some room for very tight dresses embellished with sparkles and light feathers (my favorites, of course) and some unconventional looks that included pants under tulle skirts or simple white dresses with a train made of tulle ruffles.
3. Julia Kontogruni
Julia Kontogruni is an established bridal fashion house with over 15 years of experience that showed its collection for the first time at VBBFW. Their dresses are known for their boned corsets and exclusively developed details created exclusively and personally by the designer Julia Kontogruni.
The 2020 collection challenges the senses again. Luxury embroidery and French lace are used in the unique design of the corset and combined with hand made flowers and decorative elements in one masterpiece gown to recreate the first day of Spring. Julia Kontogruni takes us back to the world of tales with her dresses.
If you are the kind of girl that wants to feel like a total Disney princess on her wedding day, Julia Kontogruni is your choice. All the dresses were princess gowns, with huge (REALLY HUGE) voluminous skirts made of tulle and combined either with lace or sparkles (not both at the same time, which would be a little too much, just a little). However, at the end of the show, she did present a few mermaid-shaped gowns and one last dress (my personal winner), which was short but with a big ruffled skirt long in the back – best of both worlds!
4. Marchesa
Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig are the two women behind this brand: Marchesa. After a decade of showing their bridal collections in small presentations and appointments in NY, the designer duo decided to stage their first-ever bridal fashion show and to do it in Barcelona during VBBFW (such a big honor for us!).
Marchesa was the star of the Bridal Night, the biggest and most magical night of the event that each year celebrates the show of an international bridal designer. The show was held at the beautiful garden of Palau de Pedralbes. Although the wonderful beauty of the setting, the Marchesa dresses shone (bright like a diamond) with their own light and really made a difference. The fabrics, the details, the colors, the accessories (I live for the big flower earrings)… everything was sublime. Chapman and Craig’s new collection presented romantic bridal and evening dresses worth of a fairy-tale: major ballgowns, tulle capes, sparkling crystal embellishments, and plenty of their signature 3-D flowers and very long (the looooongest) matching veils. It all felt like if you were inside a fantasy garden full of real fairies dressed in bridal gowns. It really was magic.
5. Pronovias
We all know Pronovias. It is one of the biggest bridal brands in the world that, with more than 50 years of experience, continues at the top of the industry, dressing brides in almost every country of the planet.
I must admit that I did not really like their last year’s collection, but I must say that I did like this one: the 2020 collection called Beyond the Stars. The inspiration comes from famous paintings portraying the night sky, the moon, and the stars. Metallic styles are brought to life through gold, platinum and silver brocades, fringes, transparent elements, and invisible seams, all of which emanate beauty and femininity.
The dresses were more modern and more bridal at the same time. We could see brides with pants, very simple yet beautiful white satin slip dresses, short dresses with sparkles and feathers (I just want to say here I am currently obsessed with feathered dresses) and also big ball gowns with ruffles and tulle princess skirts.
The setting of the show was also pretty amazing and different: all-black floor and walls, the models walked in circles in front of a big screen that replicated the stars in outer space. The show ended with a model hanging off the ceiling wearing the final look. It may sound a little too much and almost crossing the shabby line, but it really looked good.