Casablanca | Autumn Winter 2024 | Full Show

Venus As a Boy Our idea of time as a linear composition obliges us to believe that we live in uninterrupted progression – that what we know now more than we did before, and that the promise of the future holds more keys to understanding our nature, and our world, than the past. Whilst that maintains an ongoing spirit of discovery, sometimes it breeds a resistance to past ideas, and what, perhaps, is of vital necessity, is to now find an interplay between the past and the present. In Casablanca’s new collection, we turn our eye towards ancient Greece. This collection, Venus as a Boy, is about reimagination. We take our name for the collection from the Bjork song of the same title, which in of itself points towards a reimagination of the idea of Venus, where Venus herself was a Roman reimagination of Aphrodite. Venus as a Boy, whilst becoming a significant metaphor for the essence of this collection, also holds a strong relationship to Charaf Tajer, founder and creative director, a song in which the music – a symphonically unique arrangement of classical strings of an almost Arabic influence, combined with a drum-pattern of a distinguished nineties rhythm, and the lyrics, which deeply with resonate with Tajer. Friends and colleagues have often discussed how Bjork’s lyrics in the song reflect his outlook on life, a pure curiosity and desire for beauty; “He believes in a beauty, He’s Venus as a boy.” In playing with the ideas of time, re-contextualisation, and weaving togethe