New York

Love Among The Ruins. Interior AW22

| 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.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

Cheerful Vibrance. Rosie Assoulin AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Rosie Assoulin‘s autumn-winter 2022 collection radiates with cheerful vibrance and off-kilter charm. The new season offering is driven by experimental silhouettes and idiosyncratic details that make the designer’s clothes always so compelling. The biggest surprise is the play with big hips, inspired by 19th century panniers. But in case of Assoulin, such fashion statements never feel “too” evening or “too” red carpet – those are charismatic garments for a bold personality that loves the process of dressing up on the daily basis. What makes the New York-based designer stand out is her ability to transform everyday life observations into fashion. The opening look, in powder blue moire accented by caramel-colored gloves, is a crop top with a jutting ruffle inspired by the silicone bib Assoulin’s young daughter wears while eating. The skirt mirrors the top’s 3-D shape, but while the latter feels futuristic, the former is historical. Still, they work together, the sweeping fabric with the sculptural accents. The folkish patterns feel lively and naive in a good way: nature-inspired watercolor prints run throughout the collection, and on the vegan shearling coats (obsessed!) they look straight out of the 1970s. In our turbulent and highly disturbing times, the simple message behind the top with an oval front depicting a blossoming tree and its roots speaks volumes. The tree’s symbolism of constant evolution was crucial to Assoulin’s conception of the collection. P.S. Pay attention to the accessories: the label’s signature jug hand-bags are back!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

Mycelium. Alexander McQueen AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Showing in New York somehow made Sarah Burton‘s Alexander McQueen feel more compelling and… fresh. Lee Alexander McQueen brought his show to New York twice, first in 1996 with Dante and again in 1999 for Eye. Sarah Burton was with him on both trips, and she was back in the Big Apple to present her autumn-winter 2022 collection for the label. “America and New York have always been so much a part of McQueen,” she said backstage. “It feels part of our creative community. It’s great to honor that.” Piles of mulch made from fallen trees gave off a peaty tang in the Brooklyn warehouse venue (it’ll be reused in plantings, she said), and birds and insects chirped on the speakers before the soundtrack settled into the groove of “A Forest” by The Cure. Backstage Burton was talking about mycelium, the underground fungal network that’s sometimes called nature’s “wood wide web,” connecting trees with one another and transferring nutrients and minerals plant-to-plant. The humble mushroom has taken on a new vogue in recent years with the mainstreaming of psychedelics, but Burton laughed off a question about microdosing. “What I really love is that the trees talk to each other and they sort of heal each other,” she began. “The thing is, they’re healing, but they’re toxic as well. There’s a danger to them.” A pair of dresses were fantastically embroidered in mushrooms whose vivid colors Burton said were lifted from real life, their mycelia represented by long skeins of silk fringe. A couple of unraveling sweaters were almost as trippy. Burton’s McQueen is a thoughtful balance of hand craft and haute tailleur. She was in New York City, after all, so she didn’t neglect to show off the label’s sartorialism. A smoking with a crystal-embellished back panel and a spangled bandeau in place of a shirt would be a glamorously restrained red carpet look for what’s likely to be a sober Oscars ceremony at the end of the month. Other sharply cut pantsuits picked up the psychedelic colors of those mushrooms – acid green and yellow, electric blue, bright red. “I wanted it to have a pace to it and an energy to it… and there to be color,” Burton said. “I wanted it to have a vibrancy.” Most notable were the suits that looked like they’d been spray-painted with the shadow of a rushing body. Burton said these were inspired by yet another archival McQueen collection, Number 13, the show in which the model Shalom Harlow and her strapless white dress were painted by a pair of robots normally used in the automotive industry in a sort of erotic dance. McQueen would’ve likely dug the mycelium theme; he was always intrigued by the elements, always finding his way back to a nature vs. machine theme. Many years on, that struggle is more real than ever. Burton brings that awareness and a woman-centered approach to what she’s doing here.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

After Hours. Tom Ford AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Tom Ford‘s absence during New York Fashion Week, caused by COVID-19-related issues, was perceivable. The designer dropped a lookbook in the middle of the Paris schedule instead. Ford was a regular here during his Yves Saint Laurent days 20 years ago. The difference between then and now is that Ford’s been Californiafied – a casual element has infiltrated his collections since he moved to Los Angeles in the shape of tracksuits and other forms of athletic wear. That aside, he’s into chic, killer suits as well. Tailoring is one of the threads holding this season together, only these aren’t suits for the 9-to-5 grind. Designers have been thinking about after-hours suits, the kind women used to wear when we still went out to clubs. Ford was clearly feeling for something similar with his sumptuous velvets, satins, and faux furs, and the rich jewel tones he styled head-to-toe: sapphire velvet blazer-hoodie hybrid and sapphire velvet trousers; turquoise stockings paired with turquoise evening sandals. Or the amethyst feather chubby that was accessorized with an amethyst hood, hose, and wedge heel shoes. This was one of Ford’s more covered-up collections of late, until the end. The lookbook finishes off with a pair of Guy Bourdin-ish images of long dresses whose sexy interplay of sheer and opaque shows the young guns playing with body-con exactly how it’s done.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

Total Elevation. Marc Jacobs SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

New York Fashion Week may officially be over, but that didn’t stop one of it most beloved showmen from unveiling a surprise new collection on Instagram. What’s New York’s fashion scene without Marc Jacobs? The 10 look line-up (which will be available exclusively at Bergdorfs), is essentially a glamorous reworking of Marc’s remarkable autumn-winter 2021, with their grand silhouettes slashed into new skin-baring forms, cargo pants transformed into sweeping statement skirts, and brilliant paillette embellishments wrapped into something stunningly new. The collection came up quite spontaneously. As Jacobs avoided the phygital fashion and virtual shows which largely defined this industry through 2020 and 2021, he instead waited until he had the potential of a live runway to create a collection for. “We were like, ‘we’re not showing until we can do a show the way we show,’” Marc told I-D. “But then, this time, me and Joseph [Carter, from his design team] and Alastair (McKimm, Marc’s collaborator) decided that we were going to make some clothes. And we were going to photograph them.” In result, this new collection appears exceptionally impactful, something of a deeply desirable dystopian fantasy. “We played with the clothes that we made before in order to make other, new clothes,” he explained. So paillette pieces were slashed and wrapped into new apparitions, while a denim jacket draped on the body to become a fabulous sculpted stole. Couture-level deconstruction, something the designer is obsessed with lately. “There was this word that kept going around early on in the process: elevate,” Marc laughed. “‘It has to be elevated, it has to be elevated.’ I looked it up in the dictionary – and to elevate has two definitions. Firstly: to raise or lift something up to a higher position, and secondly: to raise to a more important or impressive level.” He managed to tap into both meanings with this mind-blowing offering, as we can see.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.