Blooming Queens. Collina Strada SS22

September 8, 2021September 8, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

Nature. Sunset. Raving. Queens. Situated on Brooklyn Grange’s rooftop garden in Sunset Park, the Collina Strada show was a vibrant welcome back to physical fashion shows in New York. Hillary Taymour described the scene as following: “We’ve got a farm queen, broken skater queen, prom queen, and a frog princess.” The simple message was that after a year of doldrums, we should all have the freedom to dress up as the queens we are. For spring-summer 2022, the designer has found a happy marriage between the natural world and the world around her. She’s deftly fusing literal garden references with real-world pragmatism: the actress Sasha Frolova walked in a macramé skirt and a hand-beaded bodysuit hand-in-hand with her grandmother, who played the gardener. The voluminous, wafty dresses, mostly layered over pants on the runway, were for those sticky summer days when you feel ick about your body, but you’ve got to go out. A new trouser style had a thong built in, for when you feel hot, and belts were made to look like crystal tramp stamps – for when you feel really hot. There were tons of new layering pieces like upcycled tees, cargo trousers, bias-cut and draped midi skirts, and even swimwear, not to mention the sculpted horse and beetle corsets. Look even closer, and you’ll find dozens of new accessories too, like upcycled raffia bags and necklaces and straps made from studio detritus. The level of handwork in this collection was dialed up exponentially, with hand-beaded pasties and flowers accompanying more producible items like doodle jeans and a new collaboration with Levi’s that birthed star-studded straight legs and classic denim jackets. On the runway Taymour dialed the wackiness of it all up to 11 as well. Models plucked carrots, sprinted down the catwalk, waved, laughed, and hugged while two live performances took place. The front row – composed of Kim Petras, Tommy Dorfman, Hari Nef, Aaron Philip, Camila Mendes, and Ella Emhoff – was eating it up, maybe even literally. An errant carrot on the runway, while rhinestone-studded, would have made a nice snack. In addition to bringing the good vibes and high octane fun to NYFW, Taymour also brings a deep commitment to reducing waste, turning bottle caps into pieces of high fashion jewelry. As we return to Fashion Week “as usual,” more of her peers should consider doing things the Collina Strada way.

Collages by Edward Kanarecki.

Into The Groove. CDLM SS22

September 8, 2021September 8, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

New York Fashion Week is on! And it’s real. What a joy to see the young designers back on the runway. CDLM‘s spring-summer 2022 line-up is a good start. Held at the James Fuentes Gallery on the Lower East Side, the label’s designer, Chris Peters, delivered a post-lockdown vision of a night-out wardrobe. Romantic, frayed, messy, and intoxicating vision of what can go right and, what the hell, what sometimes goes a bit wrong, but in the end, what makes something a beautiful reminder of all the possibilities of life between dusk and dawn. And the emphasis here is on hands: Peters made most of these clothes himself, using whatever was around, or out of pieces of things he has lovingly collected, then given a second life. Take, for instance, the poetically dulled gleam from a top made up of patching together pieces of a 19th century Indian tapestry, worn with black satin evening trousers whose perfection of cut pursued an idea of anti-fit; a little off, a lot cool. “A trouser which feels quite sexy, which has attitude,” is how he put it. Another case in point: The deadstock floral fabric radically transformed when used for a pair of low slung jeans. Elsewhere, that adorned top and minimal-glam trouser combo came in the form of a draped tank made from unused tulle from the ’50s, its athletic shape blown apart by the swoosh of an ostrich feather, a recurring motif, partnered with straight-cut anyone-can-wear-’em pants. Other times, the shirt was the focus: a white cotton tux version over a second-skin tubular dress, or a deconstructed style in a washed, faded black, wrapped and draped and twisted around the body. But sometimes the eye would be wrested away from the clothes, and look at the adornments: the crochet garland scarfs, or the entanglement of delicate chain necklaces. For Peters, the question, he said, was where does the clothing stop and the ornamentation start? As he remarked, “You can wear one of the garlands with your t-shirt. That’s your gown.” What he is doing is opening up the conversation to create things that don’t just exist in a vacuum, but can be in conversation with what you already own, and wear, and love to death. Pieces which can, in other words, do the thing we’re learning to do again: socialize.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Widly Odd. Bottega Veneta AW21

September 4, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

Daniel Lee‘s autumn-winter 2021 collection for Bottega Veneta, which went public just yesterday, makes me wonder if the designer’s vision for the brand starts to get over-worked and somehow distorted. The collection was presented months ago at Berlin’s Berghain to a handful of house-friends, and as the label ambitiously went Instagram-less, the mist of mystery should have done its magic. But nothing works here, and I feel like nobody paid attention to yesterday’s release. Is the flop-era of “new Bottega” on the horizon? Looking at the hectic garments, Daniel Lee’s latest line-up is ripe with diversions which rather create a sense of inconsistency. The fringed shearling coats that are this collection’s showpieces look odd, but not good-odd, rather cumbersome-odd. Reportedly, the line-up emphasizes couture-level craftsmanship. The brand’s press notes revealed that the glass dresses here take between 135 and 250 hours to complete; a black and white zebra stripe coat, meanwhile, features 4.3 million stitches on an embroidery machine; and each of these colourful outfits have over 4,000 feathers, all hand-embroidered. It sounds spectacular, but in reality it just gets lost in all the noise (or maybe the foggy look-book shots are unfortunate…). The merging of the “fabulous” and the “functional” might be one of the smartest and most satisfying pandemic after-effects on fashion, but this season Lee gets it wrong.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Glamour-To-Wear. Area AW21

September 2, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

Area’s Piotrek Panszczyk and Beckett Fogg continue to push the envelope with their made-to-wear glamour. Since launching the brand in 2013, the designers have done so much introspection and recalibration that it’s hard to know if it’s the go-to brand for haute space bitches, haunting Dadaist ghouls, pop star glamazons, or former first ladies. Ask Panszczyk and he’ll answer that the label has always been for everyone but the clothes didn’t always show it, seasonally skewing in favor of one audience while cutting out the rest. Panszczyk and Fogg took 2020 to recenter themselves and their brand, choosing to show in season and to make salability and creativity equal parts of their process. Not either/or but both. As Panszczyk explained over a Zoom call, their shoppers have just as much desire for a couture-grade crystal pantie as they do a pair of crystal-studded jeans. To meet their needs, Area presented its own kind of solution dressing this season, injecting glamour into normcore and normalcy into high-gloss glamorama. Jeans enter the picture in a medium-wash straight-leg style adorned with crystals and paired with a bitchy little bustier. Tweed suiting is cropped and shrunken, with rhinestone fringe falling from hems. A classic LBD comes in vinyl, and the brand’s famous pale pink lamé returns in the form of iridescent minidresses, corsets, and skirts. Knitwear is growing too, with pink and lime pieces dotted with tiny crystal bows. This new Area wardrobe captures the vixenish nature of the label without compromising on wearability; exactly the branding exercise a company needs to push it from emerging to established. But Panszczyk and Fogg are smart to not let their good business sense totally overshadow the weirdness that makes Area special. During the pandemic they connected with Chinese designer Dingyun Zhang, whose enormous puffer jackets have also caught the eye of Kanye West and his Yeezy team. After a couple DMs, the trio decided to collaborate, cropping Zhang’s puffers into cloudlike vests, bralettes, and skirts, and then tamping them down with Area’s crystal harnesses. The results are delightfully kooky, heavenly, and sensual all at once. Area’s year of questioning has yielded some good answers.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Scale Up. Jordan Dalah SS22

August 11, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jordan Dalah is one of Australia’s most intriguing, emerging fashion talents. When you see Dalah’s cocooning garments that extend and distort the potential of the human silhouette, there’s really no wonder why he opened this season’s Australia Fashion Week in Sydney – his works are stunning. The designer has been toying with gigantic, exaggerated shapes and cloudy silhouettes for quite some time now, and his padding and puffing couldn’t feel more right for now, least of all because his clothes are the kind that make you want to drift into a daytime nap just wearing them. But Jordan’s Elizabethan volumes as well carry a strong sense of theatre and performance. As Dalah explained to the press, for spring-summer 2022 season he spent the months leading up to his runway debut “finding the strongest silhouettes I could make – and then really knocking them out.” His fluted shapes and high, gathered shoulders are positively supersized, cloaking models in quirky stripes, graphic patterns, and soft rose-colored silks. That’s where the surprise element comes in: underneath some of Dalah’s more dramatic shapes are removable tubular bustles that look something like a pool floatie. When the dresses are deflated, so to speak, they lose their gargantuan proportions and reveal expertly done sensual bias draping. Other pieces are cut slim from the start, like a ’40s-ish black button-up midi-dress and an evocative light blue mini with a pierrot collar and bell cuffs. A leather jacket with signature exaggerated sleeves has more mass appeal – ditto the puffed sandals made in collaboration with Actually Existing and the puffed robes made with Common Hours. Dalah has proven he has the mettle to think big and practically.