Amazing Fashion Fairytale Of light And Colour

Don't miss this remarkable fashion show by French designer Franck Sorbier, who used just two designs and stunning visual effects to narrate a medieval French fairytale on the ramp in Paris last week.

It's not often that a couturier showcases just two of his creations on the runway, particularly in Paris, the fashion capital of the world.

But that's just what designer Franck Sorbier did at his haute couture fall/winter 2012-2013 fashion show on July 4.

Using just two dresses and hi-tech lighting and projections, he sought to retell a popular 17th century French literary fairytale, Donkeyskin by Charles Perrault.

The story revolves around a beautiful princess, whose father the king wants to marry her. Having made a promise to his queen (her mother) that after her death he will not marry anyone who is not her equal in beauty and virtue, the king is left with little option other than to seek his daughter's hand.

The princess seeks her fairy godmother's advice to avoid her father's marital overtures and she is told to make impossible demands of him if he wants her consent. And so she asks for a dress the colour of the sky, a dress the colour of the moon, a dress as bright as the sun and finally, the skin of the king's special pet, a miraculous donkey whose droppings are of gold.

The desperate king fufills all her wishes and the princess keeps these riches safe in a chest provided by her fairy godmother. When she finally obtains the donkey's hide, she wears it as a diguise and escapes to a royal farmhouse, where she is hired as a kitchen maid despite the hideous appearance of the donkeyskin she wears. On special occasions, however, in the privacy of her own quarters, the princess removes the donkey skin and dresses in the beautiful dresses gifted her by her father.

On one feast day, the prince whose household she works for and who is currently visiting the farmhouse, spies on her through a keyhole and is so taken with her in her finery that he falls ill with longing.

In his ailing state, he asks for a cake made with her own two hands and claims nothing else will cure him. Despite being advised that she is ugly and dirty (no one else knows of her beauty beneath the donkey's hide) he insists and so the princess bakes him a cake. As she does so, one of her rings falls into the batter.

The prince discovers this ring when he eats the cake and insists he will only marry the woman whose finger the ring fits perfectly. After all the women in the kingdom fail to get it on, it is finally the princess' own turn after he requests that 'Donkeyskin' try it on as well.

Once it fits, she finally sheds the animal hide and dresses herself in one of her fine gowns. The prince's parents are delighted with her beauty and her own father, who has remarried a beautiful widow, attends their wedding and seeks his daughter's forgiveness.

For his special interpretation of Donkeyskin, Sorbier presented just two gowns -- a voluminous white ballgown worn by his princess and the black dress and matching headdress of her fairy godmother.

Images and light were then beamed onto the princess' gown, from an open road signalling her desire to escape and morning dew and underwater reeds to represent her waifish beauty. Then she falls in love with the prince, a beating heart appears on her blood-red dress.