Total Magic. Rodarte AW23

February 12, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rodarte‘s return to New York Fashion Week was a magical treat we all needed. A banquet was set with candle-lit chandeliers, baskets of fruits, and multi-tiered cakes, all covered in silver glitter and placed on silver tablecloths. This was a brunch for Rodarte fairies that were about to fly down the runway. “For whatever reason, this season we were like, ‘we wanna do something inspired by fairies.’” Laura and Kate Mulleavy explained. “Our mom’s an artist so we asked her, ‘Can you draw us some fairies?’” She did. Her colored pencil illustrations were then blown up and placed across airy caftans with feather or ruffled chiffon trims. Very whimsy and very witchy, as well as weird and romantic. This being a Rodarte show, the fairies weren’t just fairies. They were gothic fairies (in Siouxsie Sioux-inspired eye makeup and black lipstick). Laura and Kate have always had a penchant for finding beauty in darkness, but the darkness wasn’t so much horror as it was maybe a sense of time that’s passed. But whatever it was, the gothic fairies led the Mulleavys to a collection full of glamorous evening gowns. A series of languid jersey numbers with dramatic bell sleeves opened the show. They were followed by different versions in burnout velvet, embellished with sequins or with floral appliqués, the sleeves dragging shredded cheese cloth that had been dyed black; one of the designers’ favorite old techniques that they brought back this season. The Mulleavys also brought back their signature cobweb knits, made by hand from a collage of materials and textures: the one in shades of yellow with bits of silver felt joyous. Elsewhere, black satin bias-cut dresses had a 1930s feel with Victorian details like V-shaped lace insets, velvet mutton-sleeve bodies with white lace trim, and white lace capelets. Four models wore bulbous shapes made entirely from metallic fringe. They were powerful and fun, and the way they caught the light as the models walked down the runway brought an element of whimsy and fantasy to the collection. The silver one was added to the lineup last minute, after the silver banquet was suggested for the set design. “You have to stay open; every day you have a new creative point and until the last minute you’re still pushing to make it better and more your story,” Laura said. She was talking about the silver gown, but she could’ve been speaking about their creative approach as a whole. “This show, to me, is exactly who we are as designers,” Kate added.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Cupid’s Door. Alexander Wang AW23

February 9, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

And just like that, it’s New York Fashion Week. The first show on the schedule, at least for a brief moment, made you feel like in the old days. 10 years ago, in 2013, Alexander Wang‘s show was also an opener in New York’s biggest fashion event. Anna Wintour sat in the f-row, hot music was bumping all over the rave-y venue, Instagram was just starting to be a thing, TikTok was non-existent. Wang was the city’s favourite fashion darling – and he was about to show his first collection for Balenciaga in Paris (anyone remembers that?). But we are in 2023, and the world-wide mood is different, even if NYFW does it best to look like in the pre-pandemic times. And Alexander Wang is no longer a new-gen designer with no controversies attached to his name.

In between May 2019, the time of Wang’s last NYFW show, and now, the designer faced allegations of sexual misconduct that threw the future of his business into question. He made a public apology and his accusers announced they were “moving forward“. He put on a show in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in April of 2022. Honestly, nobody cared to look at it. Yesterday’s New York comeback had a dramatic tension: will anyone care this time? It seems the fashion world forgave Wang, and the designer somehow managed to dive back into the city’s scene of good PR and viral people. A promo spot on his Instagram Reels starring Anna Delvey, the socialite fraudster under house arrest in an East Village apartment, seemed to suggest he wasn’t proceeding from a chastened place. Cheeky is more like it. That fits with the collection’s theme. He gave it a name, Cupid’s Door, and dressed the location in boudoir-ish style, with dusty pink velvet curtains and a mesmeric zebra-stripe carpet; lighting gels that cast a red glow over the whole place. Sexy is enjoying a comeback of its own in the wake of the pandemic. Julia Fox walked the show dressed in a barely-there nude dress and and man’s jacket, like the modern-day version of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex & The City‘s season 1. Lace-edged camisoles, low-slung python print pants, boxer briefs peeking over the tops of waistbands – all of that was here, too. No sight of novelty, clearly. Rather, a lot of ideas many other designers in New York went through in the last couple of seasons.

The show was divided into three acts: the opening women’s section featured a lot of denim and faux fur in a variety of textures and silhouettes, very downtown style. Backstage he mentioned Wong Kar Wai films like 2046 and In the Mood for Love, which might have prompted the dressy vibes. Next came a men’s grouping that was quite cool and simple: athleisure-y items like sweatpants and sweatshirts in soft, high pile fabrics, alongside cropped vests and more animal print pants. The ending was the weakest point of the collection. A series of silk fringe dresses suspended from heart shapes built on a foundation of sheer net that revealed as much as they concealed. Eveningwear was never Wang’s thing, and that previously mentioned short stint at Balenciaga didn’t help with crafting that. The thing is, the tumultuous period the designer went through eventually revealed the basic fact that fashion has dozens of other designers who can fill the “sexy” niche in a much better and fresher way than Wang. The autumn-winter 2023 line-up had its ups, but in overall, it seems to be nothing more than Insta-friendly styling.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – On The Phone. Courrèges AW23

February 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Courrèges is gradually becoming a brand with a contemporary feel that offers some truly desirable clothes. All that thanks to Nicolas Di Felice, who with every season redefines what this French label is to a modern-day audience. The most important aspect the designer orbits around is the functionality of clothes seen through the lens of social observation. In the men’s autumn-winter 2023 (and women’s pre-fall) line-up, his thought process was triggered by watching the phenomenon of people hunching over their phones. “I’m really working on kind of a new silhouette that is really, like, bending,” he said. “It really seems like nothing, but actually it’s something, this reflection of us on our phones.” Somehow, that idea bloomed into a sexy and cool wardrobe. Technically, Felice’s inspiration of the staring-at-screens impact on human posture brought about a slight forward-tilt of the shoulder line – and the ingenious idea of inserting an invisible zipper extending to the elbow on the inside of tailored sleeves, “so you don’t have to ruin you clothes!” The lines of Courrèges are sharp, mostly dark, and cleverly sliced by Di Felice to adapt the original space-age minimalism of the founder for the new generation. That’s another of his talents: witness what he’s named “mini-skirt pants.” It looks like a plain black long-sleeved tunic, but there’s a narrow gap, high up on the thigh; a flash of flesh where the hem meets the pants. An incendiary item he proposes for all genders. Très cool.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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To Nature. Uma Wang SS23

February 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Sometimes, you’ve got a fashion collection that is pure poetry. Uma Wang‘s spring-summer 2023 is one of these rare examples. Her line-up is an ode to nature – but not in a cliché way. The neutral palette conjured the serene eternity of desert sands; coffee dye gave an earthiness to some of the materials. The second look was created from one length of a metal and cotton fabric that resembles tree bark. Sheer nylon was used, said Wang, to evoke “a white cloud in the sky.” Just as Wang harnessed different natural elements – sky and earth, for example – so she combined menswear touches with soft draping, flou, and structure. This collection read as mature as opposed to trendy because of the clarity of Wang’s vision, which is largely derived from her passion for materials. The designer works closely with Italian mills creating incredible, often textural fabrics, which help to inform the silhouettes. In general, Wang’s stories are like collages of different stories that somehow make sense when connected. For spring, Wang borrowed from the world of interiors a frayed cotton meant to evoke a woman wearing something she found at an antiques market. There was an ’80s boldness to menswear-inspired coats, jackets, and sleeves, for example. The square-toe shoes were inspired by those worn during the Ming Dynasty. The styling of the necklaces and hats tripped up a narrative that otherwise felt like a true fusion of elements relating to culture, history, and gender forged into something new. In her show notes, Wang wrote of nature existing beyond boundary and taboo; she associates wilderness with freedom. The humility one feels in the face of the natural world finds a parallel in the designer’s respect for textiles and craft, but otherwise this collection, which showcased Wang’s formidable talents, celebrated the power of a woman, giving her the option to stand strong, proud, free with the sturdiness of a tree or the gentleness of a cloud.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Heroes. Marc Jacobs SS23

February 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Marc Jacobs held his latest fashion show in the Park Avenue Armony, a week before New York Fashion Week officially begins. Even if the king of New York’s fashion scene doesn’t return to the event, the entire outing felt very New York. The giant room was pitch dark and almost empty, save for a single row of chairs and spotlights illuminating the space in front of them. A solo violinist, Jennifer Koh, played a portion of Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach.” Jacobs gave the collection a name – “Heroes” – and included a Vivienne Westwood quote in his show notes more earnest than irreverent: “Fashion is life-enhancing, and I think it’s a lovely, generous thing to do for other people.” Westwood died in December at 81, and when she passed Jacobs posted a black-and-white photo of the legendary designer as a young woman. In it, she wears her bleached blond hair in spikes and a button-down stenciled with the words: “Be reasonable, demand the impossible.” At the time, Jacobs wrote that he was heartbroken, saying, “I continue to learn from your words, and all of your extraordinary creations.” This collection was an emotionally charged homage to the “godmother of punk,” from the top of the models’ peroxide wigs to the bottom of their platform shoes. Naomi Campbell, you’ll remember, famously fell in her platforms at Westwood’s autumn 1993 show. But Jacobs has learned much more than that from the late designer. The “tit tops” of Westwood’s Pirate collection circa 1981, in which she twisted t-shirt fabric into nipples, were reinterpreted as casual knit leotards and nipped and tucked sheath dresses. Here, the romantic silhouettes that Westwood lifted from old master paintings, with their bustles and bustiers, got a dressing down in military surplus, heavy on the cargo pockets. Jacobs recreated her signature volumes by turning a shirt into a skirt and tying its sleeves in the back, or by dressing models in upside-down jackets, hems dramatically framing their faces. A few of the models walked past with their arms crossed, pantomiming Westwood’s defiant audacity. Long-line coats with the geometric patchworks of quilts may not be of direct lineage, but their DIY-ness chimes with Westwood’s punk ethos. They’re special pieces, not precious because of the materials Jacobs used – they actually looked quite humble – but because of their remarkable handwork. Tinged with sadness, but also with moving, creative expression, this collection proves again that no one does it like Marc.