DUBAI: Moroccan Italian model Malika El-Maslouhi hit the runway at New York Fashion Week.
The 24-year-old catwalk star, who was born in Milan, walked for US fashion label Thom Browne on Tuesday wearing a show stopping ensemble.
El-Maslouhi stepped out in a grey deconstructed striped suit. The blazer and the trousers were taken apart and patched with another material, while the shoulders of the suit were hanging off.
She also wore a large, intricate gold headpiece that covered her nose and extended over her hair.
The designer’s show, which channeled the famed 1943 tale “The Little Prince,” was an elaborate, lengthy, fully realized theatrical production, with backstories, narration and music, along with fashion featuring endlessly inventive craftsmanship, The Associated Press reported.
Brownev— who has just taken on the high-profile role of chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America — brought his guests to the Sahara to recreate the plane crash from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story. The space had a small airplane stuck in real sand and planets and stars twinkling from above.
“We find ourselves in the desert,” the taped narration began. “A plane has crashed.” A model playing the pilot, dressed in a spacesuit like ensemble with puffed sleeves, wandered about, disoriented, soon to encounter another model with hair in blonde curls reminiscent of the prince who was dressed in one of Browne’s signature gray blazers with a four-stripe band on the arm.
A series of models then walked the runway representing distant planets. These characters had high white buns with elaborate headpieces and endlessly long curled fingernails and toenails.
The designer’s collection also features a series of coats in sumptuous tweeds, all with exaggerated shoulders, with suits and ties underneath. Some of the models carried briefcases bearing clock faces — the heels of their chunky shoes also formed round clock faces, as did the stage itself.
An eclectic group of celebrities, from music figures Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah and Lil Nas X to actors Christine Baranski, Rebecca Hall and Jesse Williams, watched as the show took an emotional turn at the end, with the models coming back out in couples, hand in hand in a message of togetherness, accompanied by the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Broadway musical “Carousel.”
