AW21

Functional Chic. Peter Do AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Peter Do‘s autumn-winter 2021 collection is his best to date. The designer is confidently stepping out of his minimalist comfort zone, offering a chic take on ‘after dark’ style (something many designers are talking about in Paris this season). Those giant feather brooches placed on jacket shoulders clearly say it. Or all the lace inserts used in the tailored pieces. “I felt like it was the right time to dress up, to be seen, to say that we’re here,” the New York-based designer summed up. Twelve months of living more or less like shut-ins has spawned a collective urge for shine, skin, and sexy high heels. This newfound instinct for embellishment aside, Do’s gifts as a designer are of the engineering variety. Anyone can add decorative fringe to a jumpsuit. It takes a clever patternmaker to create pieces like floor-scraping shirts that fold up and over the shoulders in dramatic swoops; the jacket/cape hybrids modeled here by Anh Duong and Maggie Maurer; and the rib-knit halter and shrug sets that he showed with another signature: tailored kilts worn over sharply cut matching trousers. As his business grows, elaborating on these two-in-one concepts will continue to distinguish Do from the rest of the fashion pack.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Coco Neige. Chanel AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Karl Lagerfeld once said that “sweatpants are a sign of defeat“. Of course, Lagerfeld said many notorious things, but whenever I wear sweatpants myself, I’ve got these words in the back of my head… so when I saw Chanel-sweatpants in Virginie Viard‘s autumn-winter 2021, I was quite disturbed. Sure, the reason for their appearance on the runway can be justified by living in a one-year-long lockdown, working from home and so on. But still, this just doesn’t feel right. And in general, this wasn’t a great Chanel collection by Viard – simply speaking, it’s quite lazy, both in styling and design. Still, there were some ups. After years of memorable Chanel show spectacles in the vast Grand Palais, now closed for renovations, Viard felt that the time was right for a totally different ambiance to showcase collection. “I wanted to show in a small place, a club,” Viard explained during a Zoom preview with Vogue. “I don’t like big rave venues; I prefer that kind of place that is more intimate. Karl was always telling me about the shows he staged in the ’70s with the girls getting dressed on their own in a restaurant in Paris,” she added.  Viard lighted on the legendary Left Bank nightclub Chez Castel that has been the epitome of cool for generations of party animals since Jean Castel first opened the club in the 1960s. Cozily arranged on different levels in an 18th-century building or two, the dimly lit boîte on the rue Princesse attracted the likes of Françoise Hardy, Françoise Sagan, Amanda Lear, and Mick Jagger at the time, and has never gone out of fashion. “I love Castel because it’s like a house and very English,” said Viard who was amused by the idea of the Chanel girls coming down the club’s famously narrow stairs in their giant après-ski coats and then leaving them in the coatroom to reveal the skimpy little chiffon numbers underneath. The collection is infused with “ski spirit” (the season’s most prominent trend): Norwegian sweaters, furry Moon Boots, quilted salopettes, voluminous puffers, and ski pants worn with short cropped jackets that Viard has styled either with the midriff bared or with the nightclub-friendly flowered black lace camisoles that also crop up under fluid knit suits or paired with a quilted satin miniskirt. The soundtrack, mixed by Michel Gaubert, featured Diana Ross’s “Do You Know Where You’re Going To? – a song that Viard considers singularly apt for this moment. “Your own pajama party?” posited Viard as an answer. “As we can’t do anything else!”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Haunted Glamour. Thom Browne AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Most designers go for their signature codes this season – which basically means commercial and safe pieces. Thom Browne also went back to his core, but comparing to other brands (especially American ones), there’s nothing banal about his latest offering. For autumn-winter 2021, Browne’s men’s and women’s collection is an outrageous flexing of his prowess, garments made on such an extreme scale they’re almost overwhelming to look at, let alone think about wearing. There is not a shred of coziness, comfort, or relaxation here. If anything, Browne’s silhouettes have become stricter, more confining, more formal, unapologetically dramatic and glamorous. His starting points are always deceptively simple, like fusing black-tie clothing with sport apparel. But in result, we’ve got cinched and corseted, fanned out skirts, and shrunk jackets to little shrugs layered over voluminous wool piqué and flannel shirtdresses. A ball skirt that looks like layered puffers took more than 100 pattern pieces to make. A pleated trench coat required 209 patterns. The most mind-boggling pieces are made of curved plissé, inspired, Browne says, by the lines ice-skaters make on the rink and those that slalom skiers do as they race down the mountain. Underneath those bubble helmets and big-time bows are models of all genders, but Browne insists gender really doesn’t matter. He’s making beautiful, at points haunted clothes for everyone.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Body, Body, Body. Schiaparelli AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Daniel Roseberry has already proven that he’s a genius haute couture designer. With his autumn-winter 2021 collection for Schiaparelli, he also confirms he knows how to make ready-to-wear a ‘wow’ moment. “I really like the freedom in which Schiap explored things,” Roseberry told Vogue over Zoom. “You know, while Chanel was making buttons made out of double C’s and it was very much an exercise in branding, Schiap’s buttons were peanuts and wrenches and hammers and birds and insects. It’s kind of this referential gymnastics that I feel like we can have here, as long as it feels like part of one world and one language. People know they can go other places for more polite designs.” If Roseberry has more freedom than his creative director predecessors that’s largely down to the fact that Lady Gaga wore his designs at the U.S. inauguration. Overnight, as he put it in the days afterward, Roseberry had a place in fashion history, and the label itself had a new international relevance and cachet. The dove brooch (it reminds the pieces Yves Saint Laurent sent down the runway in his spring-summer 1988 couture collection) that Lady Gaga wore to the inauguration has become a visual trope; it perches on the shoulder of a fitted black minidress among several other surreal bijoux and its outline is painted in black on a white button-down. Instant Insta-favourites are of course all the “body-ornaments”: the breasts and pierced nipples, ears, eyes, noses, and lips – all of it has been cast in gold, moulded in leather, or quilted in wool crepe. “I don’t want to be precious about any part of the body; you know, it’s about kind of celebrating the whole thing,” he said. But Roseberry is no doubt well aware that breasts are a cultural flashpoint. Exploiting that flashpoint, he managed to render all the other designers playing with lingerie and kink this season look tame. The fashion industry urgently needs a provocateur, and Daniel is the ultimate answer.

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.

New Romantic. Magda Butrym AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Magda Butrym, the Warsaw-based designer, delivered a brilliant line-up for autumn-winter 2021. With every season, the designer consistently builds her style vocabulary, which is the right balance between impeccable tailoring and chic eveningwear. The new collection, entitled “New Romantic“, photographed by Sonia Szóstak and starring the one and only Małgosia Bela, is the dream wardrobe for re-emergence: a timeless, shearling coat in beige, a le smoking suit covered in sequins, masculine blazers that mean business and some of the most delightful dresses we’ve seen from Butrym up to now. Flowers are a reocurring motif for the brand, with its origins based on Polish folklore culture. This time, the designer went one step further and presented a fabulous, sequinned, red capelet that looks like an actual blooming rose. And then we’ve got the pink peony cocktail dress, which just needs a fittingly dramatic occasion to go to (even if still wearing a face-mask).

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.