fashion writing can get pretty wild

"Against the cliché of a garment fitting the human body, Poell invents a new garment, a body in itself, an autonomous form, with which one must compose, and against which one will eventually fight. This conception presupposes a first, anatomical, inversion, as well as a generic displacement. While the skeleton is internal to the human body, it becomes external in Poell’s interpretation of a garment, changing its nature to become an exoskeleton.

Movement is also altered. To wear Carol Christian Poell is to experience The Metamorphosis, when Gregor awakes one morning, after a night disturbed by confusing dreams, to find himself changed into a monstrous insect. The instant following this discovery are difficult, as he has to learn how to move into this new, unknown, body, and, at the same time, still his. In that sense, this metamorphosis differs from those nourishing the western imagination, from Lucius’s metamorphosis into a donkey (Apulée) to the Beast changing into a bear (Cocteau), since it distorts the structure of the body in itself, and rests on an inversion between the inside and the outside: the endoskeleton reversing itself into an exoskeleton. At the cost of a radical transformation of the way he moves, Gregor, as a Carol Christian Poell wearer, will soon become one with his new shell, which will show him, after the pain, a path to new pleasures, at the same time Dionysiac – the victory of the material upon the spiritual – and Judaeo-Christian – crucifying the flesh."