Fashion

Christopher John Rogers, a designer for whom rainbow stripes are a defining signature, put together half a dozen looks for pre-fall 2023 devoid of color. The title he gave the collection, “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want to,” offers a hint about his new direction. Having captured the fashion world’s attention, Rogers seems to have set out to upend expectations. “What I’m after is autonomy, the ability to do what I want,” he said. “The idea of play is paramount.” Cue the plastic clown noses and the towering silk clown hats created in collaboration with the milliner Piers Atkinson. There’s even a Pierrot jumpsuit in the first grouping, with silk flowers in place of the characteristic pompons, though this isn’t so much a novelty as it is a callback. A pre-pandemic runway show closed with a different take on the look. In the end, this wasn’t the volta face that those first looks augured. It’s just as colorful as any other CJR lineup, just as extroverted, but there is a commitment to pushing at the limits of his well-known signatures. In the studio, Rogers pointed out the porthole cutout in a boxy knit top bordered with the rainbow stripes – “it takes a lot of work to get it to lay flat,” he explained. Also complex: the sweaters that hybridized two crewnecks into one, and a sweater dress with both long sleeves and arm slits. The playfulness has a purpose; those knits can be worn in multiple ways. And the experimentation is balanced by an easy-wearing sensibility. Rogers’s new suits are oversized and unstructured; cut from recycled polyester in zesty shades of grape and crawfish, they’re the fresh, modern flipside of the more formal tailoring on his June runway. Rogers doesn’t want to get boxed into any one category, but evening wear, inevitably, is his calling card. With award season ramping up, there’s bound to be some incoming calls for the tulip gown in floral printed faille and a harlequin embroidered black column with pouf sleeves, both of which nod with flair back to mid-century couture shapes.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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You could say that Yohji Yamamoto‘s sublime autumn-winter 1998 lineup was about stretch. There were a lot of knits, both of the loving-hands-made-at-home variety and luxurious jerseys. Yamamoto explored the draping possibilities of the latter, but he also combined jerseys with more static woven materials. Post-show the designer told The Daily Telegraph that his idea was “to experiment with the ‘delayed’ reaction of certain fabrics contesting the movements of the body.” With the exception of the finale, bridal look, this was a relatively sporty show, even when it came to dressing for evening. To highlight that, Vogue photographed Angela Lindvall leaping through the Irish countryside in a knit ball skirt and ribbed turtleneck from the collection (obsessed). For the most part Yamamoto’s historicisms referenced the 20th century (the cargo-pocket peplums looked like a pre–World War II silhouette) rather than earlier periods. The caged finale gown, with its hyper-exaggerated 19th-century proportions, was the exception – and exceptional in every way. It was even accessorized with Doc Martens. Sally Brampton, reporting on the show for The Guardian in 1998, recounted that “the bride billowed down the catwalk in a cream skirt so huge that journalists in the front rows had to duck down below the skirt, only to discover a bamboo cage strapped around her waist with canes radiating out from it. Four men held up the vast My Fair Lady picture hat that floated like a snowdrift over her.”