Butterflies In My Stomach. Undercover SS24

September 28, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jun Takahashi delivered a zsa zsa zsu – what Carrie Bradshaw calls the feeling of butterflies-in-your-stomach – moment this season. Literally. For Undercover’s finale, three models materialized out of the darkness wearing strapless dresses whose skirts seemed to light up. From a distance they looked like movie projections, but as they approached it became clear the skirts were glowing from within. Moving closer still, you saw the colorful flowers and… butterflies. Terrarium dresses are a new level of ingenious, a technical feat as well as an emotionally resonant one. Through an interpreter backstage, Takahashi shared that he was grieving for people he was close to. “He feels like he’s stuck in the world, but he wants to release himself.” The butterflies, the interpreter made sure to add, “will be freed, of course.”

Reckoning with mortality is an undercurrent of Takahashi’s shows lately. It’s said that grief doesn’t end, it only changes. That it can produce powerful work was proved today. This was Takahashi at his most focused: the leitmotif that carried from the first suit to the final terrarium dress was transparent veiling or shrouding. To start, he showed neat tailoring, the sheer materials exposing the inner construction and the items he slipped between the front and back sides, like playing cards, straight razors, and silk flowers. On a camel trench the outer layer encased a set of feathered wings. Later on came more formal suits, not see-through but swathed in more black georgette. They were as elegant as any tailoring anywhere this season, but Takahashi isn’t someone who seems to look around at what his peers are doing; for one thing, he’s too busy. Three of the looks here reproduced portraits from his first-ever oil painting exhibition, “They See More Than You Can See,” held in Tokyo earlier this month. Like the figures on his canvases, the faces on the deeply ruffled skirts had their eyes deleted, or disappeared, an eerie effect that was echoed in the other figurative pieces, which reproduced the surreally beautiful paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch. At his art show in Tokyo, Takahashi said “painting is more personal”. But this was a deeply personal show and it was a spellbinder.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Upside-Down. Dries Van noten SS24

September 28, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“Familiar-unfamiliar and unfamiliar-familiar” was how Dries Van Noten described his starting point for spring-summer 2024. “Things that you really know but done in a completely upside-down, inside-out, special, strange way.” The Belgian designer took his all-time favorite wardrobe staples that have always been present at his brand, and looked at them through a new, twisted perspective. The collection came from traditional menswear – shirt stripes and khakis, with some denim tossed in the mix and lawn sports like tennis, cricket, and rugby. Van Noten made those familiars unfamiliar by adding a feminine touch. For the first exit, shirt stripes turned up on a bralette worn with a generously cut camel coat and knee-length shorts. On other looks, khaki cargo pants morphed into a long wrap skirt, and an enlarged schoolboy blazer was paired with a shirtdress covered in delicate see-through paillettes. Among the sports references, the rugby stripes were especially distinctive; he cut them into polo shirts that wrapped around the torso and T-shirts that slouched off one shoulder, as real as it gets but still unexpected. Backstage Van Noten said the collection was a companion piece to his men’s show in June, where he set out to redefine masculinity for a younger generation – cue the sequined basketball shorts. Women have been flirting with menswear essentials for decades, so it’s harder to surprise in this direction, but there were plenty of delights.

Spiritual. Niccolò Pasqualetti SS24

September 28, 2023September 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Sometimes, a small, tightly-edited collection might be worth more meanings than an entire, budget-proof fashion spectacle. “In the white space, you see things for what they are, and you forget where they came from,” says the enigmatically vivid press-note for Niccolò Pasqualetti’s spring-summer 2024 collection. The white space might refer to the white cube venue the young designer chose for his fashion show in Paris. But it might also allude to a more metaphorical, imaginary space. In such a place, one thing easily changes into another. “A simple evening dress, a classic Italian suit, caught in a moment of transmutation, evaporates into a cloud. Each detail, the buttons, the zippers, the stitching are disturbed by this process. Yet still some recognizable pieces pierce through the fog, only slightly obfuscated by it.” Garment distortions are Pasqualetti’s key signatures; drawstrings, secreted in garments, are able to totally transform the silhouette. Take the free-flowing cape that cinches itself to form a column. Like protective clothing, when pulled tightly, it forms a seal with the body. These fastenings reappear, in the shoes, and in the hoods which hide within the collars of jackets. In Pasqualetti’s poetic world, there is no night and day, as everything happens at the same time. Pockets multiply across the collection giving each look a newly practical dimension regardless of the occasion. Then, laid on top of everything, silver jewellery that resembles out-of-this-world, spiritual amulets. Yes, that might the right word to describe this collection: spiritual.

Styling Samuel Drira
Photography Cécile Bortoletti
Art direction Sybille Walter
Hair Mayu Morimoto
Makeup Asami Kawai
Casting Chouaïb Arif
Words Rhys Evans

Beauty That Ages. Hodakova SS24

September 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s interesting to see how the new generation of brands in Paris reinterpret Martin Margiela. Vaquera nods to the grittiness and rawness of the famously anonymous designer; Marie Adam-Leenaerdt references the conceptual aspect of the garment. Just like the legendary Belgian visionary, Stockholm-based Ellen Hodakova Larsson has a similar interest in the daily objects and upcyling, which she revisits through artisan techniques. Hodakova‘s spring-summer 2024 was created from selected with great care fabrics that she found in warehouses, tag sales, and secondhand shops; as such, they don’t have the happy, shiny newness of something wrapped in plastic or right off the rack. Plus Larsson chooses to work with not only easily translatable finds, like suiting, but also slightly ickier ones: nylons and brassieres. The designer specifically thought about the beauty ideal in this lineup. Her flower dresses were a reaction to filters and body modifications that seek to trap youth in amber. In response, Larsson said she “captured beauty – beauty that actually ages.” A dried flower might not have the same allure as a fresh-cut one, “but it still has a beauty.” These flora were preserved in silicone and individually, lovingly, hand-sewn onto linen. Then, the designer used lipstick this season as a metaphor for “perfection and desire,” she said. The counterpart to those tubes of rouge were ink-filled ballpoint pens. This collection included many greatest hits, all thoughtfully considered. The plastic used for the finale dress was repurposed from last season’s version, for example. New for the season was menswear, which, though twisted, had a classical feel, as did a lovely dress made of vintage tablecloths that was an actual pillar of minimalism. It was a sartorial equivalent of a blank page, much like a white shirt can be. A plain button-down paired with a spiky pencil skirt took on a kind of note-to-self function, showing the audience that these special pieces can be grounded with wardrobe staples.

Paris. Peter Do SS24

September 27, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

New York’s Peter Do delivered a refined and strong collection for his Paris Fashion Week debut. This was a much-needed distance between his eponymous brand’s abilities and the designer’s stint at Helmut Lang – which had some very mixed reviews at the beginning of September. “I want to make grown-up clothes,” Do said backstage yesterday. To start, what that meant here was you didn’t see the silly short-shorts that were for instance all over the Milan runways. The designer cut his blazers into horizontal sections, placing a band of silk twill lining with subtle logo details between a top and bottom in summer-weight wool. Some jackets were tucked into pants with a similar treatment. If that’s a runway styling trick that may not make it in the real world, many other pieces have good odds, like the jackets cropped at the midriff and the blazer vests with exaggerated shoulders. Then there were great looking trousers. The most ambitious were the pairs with vertical slices down the front that revealed a bold lash of red underneath. On the softer side, a pair of halter dresses ad provocative sheer insets in front and elegant draped backs. The draping and twisting felt new for Do, an expansion of his vocabulary. Sprinkled in were pieces from his Banana Republic collaboration, due in stores on October 10. The khaki trench with a removable shearling collar and a two-in-one chunky ribbed sweater added a more easy-going vibe to the show. Just don’t call them casual. There’s nothing casual about Do’s drive.