Art

Festive Stay-At-Home. Miu Miu Resort 2021

| Design & Culture by Ed

Miu Miu‘s resort 2021 line-up has little to do with the main collection‘s 90’s-inspired girl and sporty influences, but it’s equally charming with its chic kookiness and beautiful, diverse casting. Miuccia Prada delivers a sense of festiveness combined with stay-at-home uniform. A black satin blazer is worn with sweatpants, while a full-skirted prom dress looks easy with a chunky pull-over. As the look book’s images prove well enough, it’s an offering full of delightfully mismatched concoctions of vintage-y frocks, glam eveningwear and seductive lingerie. The overall effect is sensuality tinged with irreverence, and a certain cheeky nonchalance is all over the collection. The Miu Miu woman is a master of artsy self-representation, reconciling clashing pieces into unconventional-enough, yet well-put-together looks. She apparently knows how to balance what’s off-kilter – which sounds exactly what we should all be trying to do now, playing around with clothes you’ve already got in your wardrobe… and eventual Christmas shopping frenzy which is around the corner.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Teenage Dreams. Raf Simons SS21

| Design & Culture by Ed

This season, we’ve had more of Raf Simons than usual – first in his new role at Prada back in September, and now in his name-sake label’s co-ed spring-summer 2021 collection. There are few working designers so vocally obsessed with youth culture as Simons. But the youth Simons seeks to explore isn’t exactly the youth of today – the young people advocating for climate justice, leading protests against police brutality and racism, and volunteering as poll workers. It’s his own youth that interests him. The metadata of his website, where he streamed his spring 2021 film “Teenage Dreams,” reads: “I don’t want to show clothes, I want to show my attitude, my past, present, and future. I use memories and future visions and try to place them in today’s world.” Designers are plumbing their own histories more than ever in this digital and isolated season, but this has always been Simons’s way. The press release for his teen dream collection lists the films that inspired him, many of which he has cited before, from Alien and Alice in Wonderland to Picnic at Hanging Rock and A Nightmare on Elm Street. That’s the totality of Simons’s statements on this collection, which features his first official foray into womenswear at this brand and his first fashion film since his start in the late ’90s, when similarly rakish models loafed about in Belgian photo studios and homes. Back then they smoked ciggys and drank champers and smushed into a single couch. In today’s film they populate in a nuclear floral set by Mark Colle: possessed, crawling on the floor, snatched into a web. As Simons’s youth in revolt slunk around in the film, punctuated by pulsing beats by Senjan Jansen, his signatures came into focus. The silhouette was as slim as ever and there was ample sloganeering and graphics, things his customers old and young adore, as well as photo prints of family members of Raf’s studio team. Raf stans will appreciate the continuity of his long lean silk skirts, colorful turtlenecks with R monograms at the throat, sleeveless tunics, and body-wrapping perspex tops. A big mustard knit, the sort of sweater Simons himself often wears, will be another fan favorite. It’s worn by both a male and female model, proving the point that while this is technically a womenswear debut, female shoppers have long found comfort in Simons’s work.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Hear Out Polish Women!

| Design & Culture by Ed

Standing side by side with Polish women!

Last Thursday, Poland’s (UN)Constitutional Tribunal (an equivalent to the Supreme Court in USA) ruled to outlaw abortions due to fetal defects, making the country’s ban on abortion almost total. As of now, Poland will only allow abortion in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the pregnant person’s life (note: even these cases are being hindered, and the ruling party aims to outlaw all kinds of abortions!), making the country one of the most hostile places in Europe for reproductive rights. The topic of abortion has been attacked by the ruling party for years, but now they are taking advantage of the pandemic, doing whatever they want. This is an attack on human rights. An attack on women. Disappointing, devastating and frustrating. Read more about the spectacular protests happening across the country here. Follow @strajk_kobiet and @stonewall_poland for more up-to-date information!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki featuring Saint Laurent AW20 collection.

God Is A Woman. Mugler SS21 (1)

| Design & Culture by Ed

God is a woman, and she’s wearing Mugler. Casey Cadwallader‘s vision for the brand is empowering, inclusive and boldly feminine. That’s again demonstrated in his spring-summer 2021 collection, which wasn’t presented during Paris Fashion Week, but as an off-the-schedule sci-fi video starring Bella Hadid and friends of the label. Cadwallader pointed out the increasing importance of music videos in the absence of live performances. He’s working on clothes for those apparently, too – just think Miley Cyrus, Cardi B and Caroline Polachek! In fact, about half of his time is spent on VIP requests. The other 50% he expends on the label’s ready-to-wear, but he’s not exactly playing it safe with this category either. “I felt it was time to deal with the fantasy side of Mugler,” he said, referring to the house founder’s infamous collections of the 1990s. There’s the hyper-sexy clothes, and then there’s the way he’s going about making them. Cadwallader is putting a lot of effort into sourcing more sustainable materials. He says those bodystockings will be constructed with 100% recycled lycra by autumn 2021. And he’s also working at lowering the prices of pieces like the twisting-seam jeans he designed for his first Mugler collection two years ago and the Lycra and illusion tulle leggings and tops that he likens to “complex puzzles” of couture pattern-making. “There’s energy in young people that want to buy Mugler,” he said. That jibes with the trend toward body-conscious – and body-positive! – collections we saw this season at brands like Fendi and Eckhaus Latta. Also, what’s new – Mugler is moving to a see-now-buy-now model starting in February. This capsule collection is a “prelude” of that outing. Many brands failed with this business-mode, but who knows, a brand like Mugler might really pull it off.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Healing. Charles Jeffrey Loverboy SS21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Sometimes all we really want is fantasy, care-free-ness and uplifting escapism. Charles Jeffrey Loverboy‘s spring-summer 2021 collection ticks all of the boxes, plus one more: it’s wearable. Charles Jeffrey’s line-up is a kind of frieze of young fashion’s crazy-joyful fight against fear. Here they are, the expansive Loverboy family, captured in 64 pictures by Tim Walker, a work that’s also printed in a 16-foot long concertina souvenir of the times. “I wanted it to be a physical representation of a stream of consciousness,” says Jeffrey. “It kind of represents my brain as I was thinking on long walks to the studio during lockdown. Taking up space, that’s what we do in a Loverboy show. But now that has gone, stopped. I was thinking: What does it look like when we’re all keeping away from each other?” It ended up as the Healing, a wild celebration of sexiness, inclusion, and craft-y life-forces, with Jeffrey acting as an invoker-provoker of good against evil. “Loverboy was always a community that came together in a club, but also a digital community of friends who’ve gravitated towards us. There are a lot of really amazing people in here,” he says, describing them in his press communiqué as “our queer family captured in defiant joy.” “It was originally nicknamed the Emergency Collection in the studio,” he remembers. “Then, everyone had to go home, except me. There was this panic.” On his solitary  daily walks, the Scottish folk tradition enacted by the Burryman (“costumes that ward off evil”) suddenly popped into Jeffrey’s head. That got his creative synapses jumping. “Our interns, god bless them, had started with us bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and excited about working on the collection. I didn’t want to take that experience away from them, so we set a craft project they could work on remotely.” Community, Health, and Hope are the emblems in the Loverboy panels of protective armor, embroidered by interns in isolation. The contradictions between enforced separation and the need to feel united simultaneously sent Jeffrey down a rabbit-warren of research into “warning signs in nature.” Out of the search engine popped the vivid clashing colors and patterns in the collection, inspired by poison dart frogs, blue-ringed octopi, puss moth caterpillars, hickory tussock moths, and marbled cone snails. “Well, poisonous markings in nature are also very bright and attractive. That weird interplay felt really instinctive to me as a person who works with color. How it can ward people off, but also brings them together.” The pathway from there to healing went via chromotherapy – but practically, it’s just there quite obviously and visually in all the eye-dancing Loverboy energy radiating from multicolored knits, tartans, and psychedelic prints. There may be no physical spaces for the rituals of clubbing or fashion performances right now, but never mind. Despite the troubled times, there still exist the territorial rights to identity and psychic freedom that the Loverboy generation has mapped out – the progress, as Jeffrey puts it, “from emergency, terror, and jittering-anguish to elation, sex, communion.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.