What’s Hot (5.3.23)

March 5, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Feel-Good. Isabel Marant AW23

March 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

At the Isabel Marant fashion show, you had a comforting feeling of familiarity and were reminded who is the epitome of true coolness in Paris. The runway classics, from Anna Selezneva and Liya Kebede to Malgosia Bela and Sasha Pivovarova, hit the autumn-winter 2023 runway in quintessentially Marant designs. Square shouldered blazers, oversized parkas, boyish sweaters, ’80s cocoon coats, conical heeled boots, slinky dresses, denim boiler suits and a killer trousers shape with straight yet slouchy legs. The list goes on. Isabel Marant has long championed female empowerment in everything her label stands for, and that includes making the kind of louche, sexy but always spiritedly casual look that focuses on allowing the woman wearing her clothes to express herself and her physicality. In a season where the everyday and the real are being celebrated and elevated, where good clothes can matter and not be disposable, Marant cannily underscored how much she’s been doing that for years now. That, plus the casting of models who are her stalwarts, women who’ve been around a bit but still look utterly fab, not to mention the celebratory atmosphere of her show, translated into the fact that wearing Isabel Marant means looking good and feeling good at the same time.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Prêt-à-Porter. Schiaparelli AW23

March 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Schiaparelli‘s very couture-ish prêt-à-porter goes runway. “The higher you go in the stratosphere of luxury, the more basic it feels,” Daniel Roseberry, the brand’s creative director, declared. The collection retained many of the signatures Roseberry has established in his first three years at the house, some inspired by Schiap’s codes and some by those of other Paris couturiers: the gold buttons in the shape of keyholes and body parts, the measuring tape embroidery, the cone bra detailing inset into everything from bustier tops to jean jackets. Roseberry’s own whimsical drawings were hand-painted onto nipped waist boiled coats. The places-to-go sensibility remained as well, but no-one is wearing Schiap leggings to a hot yoga class, or doing the school run in the dark-rinse denim sets. The parkas aren’t hitting the slopes. These were lunch date, cocktails, and stepping out of the car and into the five-star hotel with the paparazzi hot on your tail clothes. Where it differed from the couture most significantly was in the fabrications. The jersey dresses, one with a keyhole on the chest and the other with miniature gold buttons marching up the torso, had an appealing ease; Roseberry called the stretch velvet of a brown halterneck dress a celebrity secret weapon: “it drinks the light.” Chic!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Exquisite. Rick Owens AW23

March 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rick Owens‘ latest collection is powerful and beautiful in its strangeness. The bulbous shapes, the rough textures, the elevated silhouettes… “Conditions in the world being the way they are, it’s kind of a delicate time,” the designer said pre-show, alluding to the war in Ukraine. “And I was thinking I wanted to do something earnest, and more formal and more deliberate. I kept thinking of the word exquisite.” In pursuit of the exquisite he leaned into matte sequins, not in the gaudy red carpet colors you associate with embellishments like that, but in more muted tones of lime green, art deco pink, and bordeaux; and not, of course, in the fishtail silhouettes that seem to multiply during awards season, but in those donut duvets and inflated draped miniskirts. Those sequins aside, Owens was working with humble materials. The cutaway skirts that exposed the hip bone on one side and trailed down the runway in a long train on the other, and the dresses sliced to the armpit? Those were ribbed knits made from GRS certified recycled cashmere. And those decaying and fraying half-skirts and coats? That was indigo denim from Japan, which had been treated with a mineral wash and shredded by lasers. Extraordinary effects out of relatively simple materials. “That’s my job,” said Owens, “to present the most excellent aesthetics I can. I know I’m commonly referred to as dark. I think no, I’m just realistic and I’m acknowledging the beauty and horror of the world. There are some people that prefer something more sugar-coated, and that’s fine, I don’t criticize that. But I prefer something with more nuance.”