Love Among The Ruins. Interior AW22

March 30, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Lily Miesmer and Jack Miner tarted Interior last year as a collection of clothing with an artistic bent. A gown made of tied scraps of fabric. A jacket inspired by 14th century armor. A pajama suit adorned with dangling fruits and vegetables. Their autumn-winter 2022 season is a little bit darker but retains the hints of absurdity and off-kilter-ness that makes their New York-based brand exciting. “The clothes are familiar but they’re a little fucked up,” Miesmer says, going on to describe their statement outerwear for the season as, “a mangy shearling. Not a perfect Upper East Side shearling.” The models at the Waverly Inn presentation (which took place during New York Fashion Week) conversed at their tables, which were decorated with martinis, oysters, shrimp cocktails, and a jiggly jello. Taper candles burned down, lending a lived-in quality to the atmosphere. The models almost didn’t look out of place, save for the pair wearing see-through gowns – one of a sheer metallic fabric, and one in black netting with a hood. Echoes of Mario Fortuny’s rich textures and Romeo Gigli’s soft-baroque chic are all over the collection – which is excellent. But by and large, Interior’s clothing already looks at home in New York institutions, worn by beautiful people in a familial setting. The most playful offering of the season was a tailored suit with trompe l’oeil illustrations by Richard Haines. The creases on the front of the trousers, as well as the darts on the jacket, are also drawn on. So is the button seemingly holding the jacket together – a hidden snap is doing all the work. Meismer calls the headline for the collection “love among the ruins.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Every Body is Welcome. Ester Manas AW22

March 28, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The body-positivity movement has been slow to gain ground in Europe – at least on the narrow platform that high fashion provides. But here came Ester Manas with her voluptuously gorgeous crew of women friends and models to demonstrate – from every angle – how it’s done in the middle of Paris Fashion Week. Manas used a brilliant phrase for her design mission: “I am making clothes to welcome everyone.” This was during a euphoric post-show backstage scene, in which all the young women who had worn Manas’ vivid, ruched, asymmetric, knitted, curve-and-skin celebrating clothes were crowding around to thank the designer. Autumn-winter 2022 was Manas’s second physical season. She’s French, her partner Balthazar Delepierre is Belgian, and they live and work in Brussels. Two years ago, she made it her mission to pursue the issues around designing inclusively size-wise. “I’m big, and always I fit on myself first,” she said. “A lot of brands have a curvy girl on the catwalk now – but the reality is, you cannot find a good size in the store afterwards. I mean – just an image, nothing more. But with us, I try to give the dream a reality.” The key to making everyone feel confident and secure is Manas’s research process – spending time with women of many shapes, understanding what works both technically and emotionally. “It’s like we became a family,” she exclaimed. “And they looked so fierce!” She has evolved ruching techniques which add in extra fabric, producing spiraling effects, and cutouts which hold securely and flow elegantly and sexily where they should. The other facet is her knitwear. Vibrant and subtle by turns, her color palette, ranging from orange and violet to moss-green, is entirely chosen from what is available, avoiding the use of virgin materials as much as she can. “We search warehouses and factories where you can find them. Eighty percent of the collection is deadstock or upcycled.” She was brimming with optimism after the show. Watching Manas, the model industry is finally beginning to wake up to what it’s missing. “I mean, we have a pretty good casting director, and last time we had twenty percent of my own friends, mixed with some girls we met who were new faces, but there were really no girls on agencies,” said Manas. “But this season when we went back, we had choice!”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Rule The World. Ottolinger AW22

March 24, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient’s autumn-winter 2022 Ottolinger collection challenges what prettiness or functionality mean in our digital age. This season, they continue with themes begun during the pandemic: bulbous, hefty knotted tops; long, trailing flare trousers with tons of stretch; and chunky outerwear either cropped or belted with a shearling rope at the waist. The shapes almost look virtual, rejecting the natural laws of gravity or glamour. Finding new ways to take up space, now modes of projecting the body, is the duo’s stated mission with their fall line. There’s enough clingy body-con stuff out there already; enough sexy and seductive. The designers have tapped into a new aesthetic that is more organic, bordering on biological. And they have worked for two years to perfect their language of lumpy, bumpy bad gals, partnering with a women’s collective of hand knitters for a white cardigan and bringing on new knitwear production to make filmy post-apocalyptic layers. It’s not all fashion for philosophy’s sake: the designers have also introduced their first bag “that can actually hold something!” said Gadient with a laugh before the show, demonstrating the use of their new slimy shoulder bag, large enough for a phone, wallet, and maybe even a Nintendo Switch. The show was held at an Esports Arena in Paris, where guests watched a video on personal monitors before the models came out, and heard for the first time Azealia Banks’ latest banger, “Rule The World“. In addition to pushing their garments to a steady, intriguing place, Bösch and Gadient also contribute to play in the digital world. It’s a smart move and they will surely be among the first to define the new aesthetic language of Web3 and beyond.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

New Eclecticism. Chopova Lowena AW22

March 22, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Chopova Lowena‘ cult carabiner skirts are a runaway success, worn the world over by Fashion Week guests, pop stars, and Real Housewives. The brand’s monogram chain necklaces and upcycled jewellery sell out instantly, and their growing blouse and bag categories have set the business up well for the future. But Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena aren’t the type to take it easy. As Chopova says, “Every season we’re trying to do new things, things that don’t feel like us. It’s interesting to see how we can make new categories our own.” For autumn-winter 2022 they have tackled suiting. “Skirt suits felt the most Chopova Lowena, obviously,” says Lowena. Theirs are made with a rounded double breasted jacket and pleated miniskirt, in deadstock orange plaid or deadstock silky synthetic. Necklaces and bracelets are laced into the collars and cuffs so that the pieces jingle and sparkle. The integration of metal chains into their clothing comes from their research into medieval dress. Each season, the designers clash a folk reference with a sport one – this time they’ve landed on ice hockey versus Renaissance Faire, extrapolating tying and knitting details and armor-like finishes and titling the collection “kiss the hare’s foot,” a medieval expression used, per Chopova, “for when you miss dinner but savor the leftover scraps.” A witty reference to their deadstock practice. The romantic-meets-brutal spirit of their collection works well, the CL boys and girls existing in an in-between. They are not pretty in their laced-together flocked dress with a white slip. They are not strange in a taffeta skirt made of 8 plaid panels, each knotted at the hem, worn with a fuzzy floral cardigan, the brand’s first earnest foray into knitwear. They are not silly either, even if rabbit-ear hoods and cartoon-print tops telegraph childlike humor. Standing boldly in their velvet tops and hardcore metal-trimmed trousers, they are something else, a new aesthetic, a new spirit of furious eclecticism that could only be Chopova Lowena. That’s the genius of their work: it simply cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

This Is Us. ERL AW22

March 21, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

ERL‘s collection look-books always have that unique, beautifully disturbing, theatrical quality. Browsing through the autumn-winter 2022 line-up, one might have an impression of watching a coming of age school play – which went full art-house. Eli Russell Linnetz’s propensity to confound and inspire is what makes him an engaging designer to watch. He crafts entire worlds for even the simplest garments and images, attaching stories to even mundane items. The forthright, yet whimsical clothing he makes goes against mainstream understandings of jeans, tees, puffers, and prim plaid dresses. Basic garments are often stripped of their magic, divorced from beauty, and reduced to mere stuff. In championing “normal clothes,” Linnetz continues the great American design tradition of Calvin, Ralph, and Dapper Dan – making the ordinary extraordinary. Linnetz signatures, like worn-in denim, printed tees, and pastoral skirts were all here, alongside new pieces like a camouflage patchwork puffer, knits in ombré patterns, crisp little cardigans, and star jacquard denim in tonal blue and the colors of the American flag. A collaboration with Salomon’s snowboarding imprint brought kooky color-ways to the collection. Plaid flannel shirts were styled to evoke Victorian bustles, shirts were strewn with pins that riff on Vietnam War protest paraphernalia, and the quilt Linnetz upcycled for ASAP Rocky at the 2021 Met Gala was reinterpreted as bulky, blocky puffer jackets. All together the collection contained many wantable, wearable things, each representing a thread of ERL’s story.