Future Vintage. Stella McCartney SS23

October 8, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

One of the best collections in Paris was delivered by Stella McCartney, who very smartly sensed the vintage world’s growing obsession with her time at Chloé and her super-hot, kitschy-chic, chaotic-good 2000s collections. The spring-summer 2023 show, presented in front of Centre Pompidou, opened with tweaked reissues of McCartney’s gold chain tops from her Chloé spring 2000 collection worn under super-sized blazers with asymmetrical skirts and net stockings. Amber Valletta didn’t wear the draped gold chain top she originally modeled with white denim hot pants in that same show (someone else did, with an added white tank top underneath), but she wear a tailored jumpsuit like the one Raquel Zimmermann had in McCartney’s eponymous spring 2009 show. The Hadids brought the noughties nostalgia full circle: Gigi in a sculpted cargo suit that echoed McCartney’s Savile Row days; Bella in a shrunken vest and low-riding trousers with rhinestone-encrusted cut-outs around the hips. While at Chloé, McCartney’s influence on the era was so vast that you might wonder why the brand’s current custodian, Gabriela Hearst, hasn’t mined those archives already. Honestly, a crime. Asked if it feels weird to see her own work revived in such a big way, McCartney sighed. “It makes me feel extremely old! My daughter, who’s 15, all she does now is go into my closet and take all my original things. And I’m like, ‘Oh, but I make similar things now.’ She’s not interested. She just wants the ’90s.” Nostalgia wasn’t, however, the driving force behind McCartney’s choice to adapt and reissue these pieces. The Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara was. She used his depictions of children as motifs on garments, and focused the collection around his slogan, “Change the History.” “I want to look back at my history and redefine where I started and where I am now and what the next Stella looks like,” said McCartney, explaining her trip down memory lane. For her, of course, that transition has everything to do with sustainability. She re-evoked the 2000s through the finest technology the 2020s have to offer: garments in regenerative bio-diverse cotton that “encourages nature”; shoes in plant-based materials like faux leather made out of grape skins; bags in mycelium mushroom leather; and rhinestone pieces created without animal glues and solvents. In a season that’s seen desperate nostalgia plunges, like Dolce & Gabbana reviving their Y2K archives with the help of Kim Kardashian, McCartney’s reenergizing of the fashion history she helped shape in such a big way felt both ethically and epically right.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Make A Scene. Thom Browne SS23

October 7, 2022October 6, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Thom Browne, as usual, delivered something more than a fashion show. His spring-summer 2023 presentation was a sort of dreamy and very dramatic performance. In his own words, it was “an American prom mixed with Cinderella mixed with the Paris Opera.” Gwendoline Christie provided a scene to remember. She emerged in a full-length, single-breasted, white-piped, braided blazer and some marvelous golden sandals with little effigies of Browne’s dachshund, Hector, at the front of each foot. After a slow mosey around the golden halls, she returned and began spritzing herself with cologne and brushing her locks. And then she told the guests what was to come: “Thom loves his little stories – and this is going to be a very long story.” And the story went a little bit like this: four rouge-lipped hot boys came and removed Christie’s dressing table, wearing quintessential Browne gray tailoring and kilts: salarymen at a Scottish reel. Then came 20 opera coats – the first in a tricolored arrangement – with collegiate numbers on each back. The came five frock coats and three swing skirts with petticoats, plus one white witch extra. And then all 20 coat wearers returned with their unders revealed: all polka-dot tailoring and pastels and peekaboo underwear. The best section ran 52 to 56, when the punks invaded the assembly. Vivienne Westwood was an unavoidable comparison, but in a Thom-Browne-kind-of-way.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Femme. Coperni SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Coperni‘s spectacular – and wildly viral – spring-summer 2023 finale could easily be a separate fashion show in its own right. The whole process lasted around seven minutes. Bella Hadid came out in her underwear, arm across her bosom, and stood on an underlit platform. What followed was down, Arnaud Vaillant said, to “our little geek” Sebastien Meyer’s specific obsession with cutting edge technology. A scientist Meyer had befriended named Dr. Manel Torres came out with a colleague and proceeded to spray the near-naked Hadid from neckline to mid-calf with a white substance that looked a bit like spray snow. When it hit her skin it had the sheen of liquid, but in the few minutes of its application it became matte. The smell, strong and synthetic, filled the Musée des Arts et Métiers’ Salle des Textiles. Hadid kept her poise during the spray-down, before one of Meyer and Vaillant’s colleagues came out and spent a minute cutting at the hem and tugging at the shoulder of the layer of who-knows-what that covered the model. And then Hadid walked the runway in a pure white dress – perfectly fitted – hat until five minutes ago had been liquid in a bottle: fashion alchemy. The final look apart, the rest of the “Femme” collection felt rather plain and flat. Highlights had included dresses made in a thousand pieces of embroidered glass that tinkled uproariously, like a recycling truck driven by an amphetamine-addled getaway driver. Other dresses came in panels connected by a sort of brutal metal suture. There was a solid gold version of the designers’ Swipe bag which – all 1kg of it – will be melted down after the show. It was created by an artisan goldsmith named Gabriele Veneri in Italy, and was accompanied by a considerable security retinue. No one got a clue what was the point behind it, expect for another “viral” moment. In the next seasons, the Coperni boys should definitely focus on their new, hi-tech patent for making a dress – or any other piece of clothing – and try making it the future of fashion.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Beach Rave. Courrèges SS23

September 28, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

I was on fence with Nicolas di Felice‘s take on Courrèges since his debut collection. But his truly cool spring-summer 2023 offering proved that the designer is capable of making the brand truly his own – without falling down the rabbit hole of Courrèges’ archives. First of all, Di Felice knows how young people want to dress everyday, especially for parties: in body-con separates and dresses that reveal as much as they conceal. His spring show conjured morning-after-a-beach-rave vibes. The set helped tell the story. In an otherwise unremarkable white studio far out of town, a circle of sand had been installed. As the music cued up, more sand began streaming from the ceiling like an hourglass, slowly at first and then faster, so that the accumulating pile started sinking as the models made their slow circuits around it. Having made the house Re-Editions into big sellers, Di Felice is looking beyond the obvious at Courrèges. He dug a vintage scuba jacket out of the archive and used its ergonomic lines to inspire a leather motorcycle coat, for one example, and he’s broken free of the starchy mod shapes so closely linked with the house history. The sensation Di Felice was after for spring was fluidity, thus the surf and scuba motifs, a recurring theme this season, and a “coral” dress made out of silicone. And thus the silhouettes draped and wrapped around the body. Since it was the morning after, models carried their slingbacks in their hands, or wore their jean jackets around their waist like a makeshift shirt (buttons down the back and exterior straps made that possible). Other pieces came with similar built-in straps to make them easy to carry when they come off on the dance floor, on the commute, or at the desert rave.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Goth Diva. Versace SS23

September 25, 2022September 24, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Versace turned up the heat in the middle of very mild-looking Milan Fashion Week. A steady stream of Prince hits pumped through the speakers as the crowd assembled at the spring-summer 2023 show, and in the middle of the runway, scores of black candles glowed behind walls of glass. Reading the signs, it looked like Donatella Versace was going goth for spring. The first four models, who emerged together, seemed to confirm it. They slithered out in clingy black jersey with slash cutouts and multi-strap platform Mary Janes. Up next were another 10 black looks, from Adut Akecg in a fringed leather motorcycle jacket and micromini, to Binx Walton in a matching bustier and hip-slung jeans. “I have always loved a rebel, a woman who is confident, smart, and a little bit of a diva,” the designer said via press release. She might as well have been talking about herself. Then came monochrome color: electric fuchsia and Princely purple, cut into a liquid jersey number or a sheer dress over satin flares, and teeny party dresses in many variations—strapless with more fringe at the hips or slinky with a cowl hood. A leather teddy was laser-cut like lace and embellished with thousands of little metal studs. This season’s prints combined tropical flowers, zebra stripes, and the label’s all-caps logo on repeat. This section included a couple pairs of jeans. Shredded in precise diamond patterns, this was not your average denim, but it was a whole lot more casual than anything Versace has put on the runway lately, a sign of Donatella’s ambition to expand and diversify her offering. Before the end, the collection moved through the black-to-bright cycle again. Mariacarla Boscono’s black suit and sheer shirtdress mid-layer were sharp. The baby dolls, garters, and lace veils in pink, purple, and acid yellow looked torn from Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”–era playbook via Stephanie Seymour in “November Rain.” For the finale, Versace had another pop-culture blast from the past, none other than Paris Hilton in pink chain mail. Rebels of all kinds welcome here.