Author: Design & Culture by Ed

Reassuring Stability. Isabel Marant AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Some things just don’t change. Like Isabel Marant collections. They always give… Isabel Marant. And that’s not a bad thing – in our turbulent and ever-changing world, at least she offers us some reassuring stability. “For me, this season was about this ballad of a girl, she’s really going to the essentials; she wears a knitted dress with a huge coat over it. I wanted to do something very evident and very cozy, and easy to wear, and being naively sexy. She’s very discreet and at the same time very powerful,” said the eternal Parisian woman. There were indeed little sweater dresses worn under big coats, accompanied by the over-the-knee boots that have become one of the season’s key trends. Another combination that in the before times of the pre-pandemic might’ve seemed surprising, but now looks like the new normal: the glam sport of a sexy evening top (here in stretch panné velvet) and shell pants. Beyond the boots and oversize outerwear, this show told us definitely that cargo pants will be big next autumn, and that pants in general are going to be lower-slung and longer of leg, likely with a little kick flare. If this designer has anything to do with it, we’ll all be in baggy jeans, too. Rianne Van Rompaey closed the show in a faded black pair with drop pockets and, as promised, a super-relaxed slouch.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

Extraterrestrial Angels. Rick Owens AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

The fog machines at Rick Owens were pumping the scent of his new collaboration with Aesop into his show space at the Palais de Tokyo. Models also carried thuribles, modern mechanized versions of the censers that priests use to dispense incense in church. Owens was a Catholic school boy. In a pre-show interview, he talked about his upbringing: “thinking and talking about morality in school all day and studying Cecil B. DeMille’s 1930s Art Deco black-and-white interpretation of the bible,” by night. “That’s what formed me,” he said with a laugh. “I’m so transparent.” For autumn-winter 2022, Owens was after something a bit more solemn following his January men’s show, whose lamp helmets and zip-all-the-way-to-the-hairline hoods look aggressive a month-and-a-half later amidst the onset of war. He quoted from his press release: “During times of heartbreak, beauty can be one of the ways to maintain faith.” This was a beauty of a Rick Owens collection, starting with a full complement of evening dresses, including a few Oscars red carpet contenders in “dusty sequins,” draped with evocative asymmetry from the shoulders and featuring collapsing volumes at the back or around the hips. Cropped and shrunken jackets and lean and languid bias-cut skirts caught a bit of the Old Hollywood glamour, but these weren’t in Cecil B. DeMille’s black-and-white. Owens combined peach and apricot, and a whole spectrum of oranges. The yellow and aqua blue pairings inevitably conjured visions of the Ukrainian flag. In a season of strong outerwear, few pieces can rival Owens’s for audacity. There were puffer jackets whose sleeves extended to the ground, duvet jackets that curled around the torso like nautilus shells, and “Theda Bara” parkas with goat fur trim that look like commercial hits in the making. “I’ve been hearing people being apologetic for presenting fashion right now,” Owens said. “We’re an industry that has to support a lot of people, there’s no reason to make an excuse for that. We are people who express the best that aesthetics has to offer. And that’s of great social and cultural value.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

Rewilding. Chloé AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Sustainability is also priority for Gabriela Hearst, whether it’s her New York-based brand or Chloé – the Parisian house. “We think about the climate crisis, we’re able to see the climate crisis,” Hearst declared. “But now it’s time to start visualizing climate success. And there are many ways of doing it. Rewilding is one of them.” More than any other high-fashion designer, except for Stella McCartney, Hearst invites discussion, inspection, even, of how she sources her materials. Which meant that a fundamental divergence between the positions of these two climate-activist fashion designers opened up at the beginning of the show. Here for autumn-winter 2022 there was leather. A lot of it. Not “vegan leather” or any of its fruit or mushroom substitutes, or its fossil fuel-derived polyester lookalikes, but actual glossy leather-leather. Made from the hides of cattle. “For me, leather is a by-product of the meat industry,” Hearst said in a preview. “So, as long as you know where it’s coming from, and you have traceability and it’s done in a proper way, you’re using waste.” Her leather comes from Italian suppliers, whose tanning processes are compliant with European environmental standards. Over to how the overture to the collection looked: strict, minimal, black, brown and yellowy-tan leather pieces, ranging from coats to shirts to narrow jeans – with an of-the-moment white tank tee – and a belted black dress with balloon sleeves. The show hewed between boy-tailored pant suits, fit-and-flare dresses, and Hearst’s characteristic affinity for ponchos and knitwear—and for searching out links with socially-responsible textile projects. The latest is her commissioning of the African-American Gee’s Bend women quilters of Alabama. The storied artist community used Chloé deadstock scraps to fashion blankets and the gilet layered over a coat worn as the finale by Amber Valletta. On the runway, Hearst wanted to materialize the hope that damage can be reversed. She did it with recycled cashmere knitted sweaters and skirts. On the front were instarsia images of melted glaciers, arid and burning landscapes. On the reverse: pictures of green mountain ranges, forests and polar bears. The only thing that misses the mark is the lack of lightness. Chloé is a French brand that is all about the flou – and Hearst, it seems, just doesn’t want go that direction. Beneath all the leathers, heavy blankets and chunky trekking boots, you wish you could see more of the feminine aspect of the label. Maybe it’s worth investigating that field next season?

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited