Fun Messiness. Molly Goddard SS23

September 19, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Molly Goddard hopes you have unforced fun while styling – and wearing – her clothes. “I wanted there to be a clunkiness to it, and a messiness, and to slow down the pace and give everything a bit more breathing room.” Now an established star in the London fashion constellation – with a consistent, solid business there to provide gravity – Molly Goddard can dictate her own pace. She added: “When I start a collection, it’s sketches, silhouettes, fabrics, textures: we swatch fabric samples and work out frills, and frills in different fabrics, and the combination of prints. I love clashing prints, clashing colors, and clashing textures.” Goddard did deliver the explosively expansive and colorful tulle dresses that fueled her meteoric rise, but they came later in a show that was served in four phases, purposely disjointed against the soundtrack. This was in order, she indicated, to echo the unchoreographed organic spontaneity of pre-internet red carpet dressing. We started with a series of dresses and a skirt whose sumptuous silhouettes belied the purposeful plainness of their fabric, a calico-toned cotton she said was there to echo the toiles that are her starting point when realizing designs. Cut in jersey, some epically ruffled pink gowns with demonstrative darting at the torso were later experiments in this contrast between silhouette and material. Goddard’s cutesy ‘Twinky’ print returned, printed on knitwear, mesh and denim sometimes worn under a layer of contrasting opaque tulle. The models wore colorful Spanish-made cowboy boots and shoes and carried ruffled bags. Menswear featured shrunken-proportioned tailoring, some frill-edged; color-drenched aran knit hoodies; and a handsomely shirred high-waisted bomber. There was also a full-length pinstripe skirt. The fireworks phase arrived in a salvo of retina-drenching intensely-colored tulle dresses, sometimes worn against casual shirting in powerfully complementary tones; pink v orange, green v purple. Full length dresses in lemon or lime tulle came over bee-striped underwear. Then we circled back to that toile-referencing starting point. Three final high-volume silhouettes in not-quite-white concluded this expertly orchestrated exercise in high-impact contrast between color, fabric, texture, and shape.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Exploration. Paria Farzaneh SS23

September 18, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Paria Farzaneh has built her platform London-based through a fiercely independent exploration of her Iranian heritage. The designer has used her brand as a means to challenge the western perception of Middle Eastern culture and aesthetic, by boldly blurring the lines between the two distinctly different worlds that have informed her experience. For her spring-summer 2023 fashion show, she invited her guests to Phoenix Garden, a charitably established community space. In a pre-show spiel there was talk of this collection reflecting Iran’s apparently 1.68 percent of citizens who are nomadic. Farzaneh mixes blatant ethnographic touches, almost costume, with highly sophisticated pieces that float above cultural codes; pants and shorts cut with a side-leg pleat, for instance, were fresh and new. The shroudy, geometrically cut lacy pieces were based on curtains Farzaneh remembered in her grandma’s bathroom. “I think in the fashion industry, utmost honesty is very lacking,” said the designer. So how to walk away from the table with a win in this dishonest business? The nomads of any culture who share Farzaneh’s roving curiosity, wherever they hail from, should understand her codes.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Through The Looking Glass. Rosie Assoulin SS23

September 17, 2022September 17, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rosie Assoulin loves the surreal and the absurd, but never goes for gimmicks and non-sense. It’s what draws people to her designs. She can fall down the rabbit hole – quite literally this season, as her inspiration was Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll – and return with a collection of whimsical pieces that are just attainable enough for real people to want to wear them, as Sarah Spellings put it for Vogue. For spring-summer 2023, however, the biggest theme was the feeling and beauty of spring. The practical pieces were boldly colored or illustrated: a suit with green gingham shorts and a red gingham blazer; a richly illustrated brown suit adorned with flowers; bottle green shantung cargo pants, full pleated skirts, and camp-collared shirts. Dialing up the whimsy were pieces like a skirt with a buttressed waist, giving it dimension and ease at the same time. The most fun in Assoulin’s collections comes from the high-wattage capital G gowns. Through a series of ties, you can personalize the swags and layers in the gingham ball skirt to your liking. Paired with a long-sleeve crop top, it’s available for your most elaborate picnicking needs. A striking cornflower blue gown with a contrasting red belt has a keyhole neckline, a caped back, and a delicately tiered skirt reminiscent of something from the Gilded Age. In her studio, Assoulin pointed out how the tiers make seam lines that almost look like a suit in a deck of cards: an abstract spade, heart, and diamond. There’s something delightful in every fold.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Take Me To Church. Willy Chavarria SS23

September 17, 2022September 17, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Willy Chavarria took us to church (the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, to be precise) for a show that mixed his signature larger-than-life silhouettes with exquisite tailoring. It opened with a beautiful song performed a cappella in Spanish by Dorian Wood about the way borders keep us separated, which could be read literally but Chavarria meant it more metaphorically. “The song is about the division in our world,” he explained backstage afterward. “If you noticed in the show, the actors were divided by ethnicity, and that was not only to represent the division that we are experiencing, but to show the solidarity within the culture. To show the strength of people when they’re unified.” First, a group of men wearing extra-long T-shirts and Dickies walked out and placed bunches of roses on the altar. The first look was a navy tailored jacket with strong, wide shoulder pads that were situated ever so slightly beyond the natural line of the body, which worked to create a great amount of tension against the extra-long lapels that extended past the top of the torso. Its intersecting lines alluded to the Chi Ro symbol, also called a Christogram. The model, who wore a collared shirt and pleated wide-leg trousers as well, carried a cross at the center of his chest with one hand.

Chavarria, who recently won the National Design Award for Fashion Design, has always favored volume and extra-large silhouettes as a way to “reclaim [the] space that has been taken” from people of color, but there was a new level of softness and sensuality woven through his collection this time around. Though it was always played against more traditionally American masculine elements like varsity logo T-shirts and football jerseys, which he turned into short, princess-sleeve tops and layered over short-sleeve button-down shirts and paired with a skirt. Men wearing robes and dresses has been normalized on menswear runways, but it was interesting to see how, in the context of a church, the silhouettes completely changed meaning and were imbued with a sensibility that hinted at both a uniform as well as tradition. “The first piece I did [for the collection] I called the altar-boy cape, and I just had it on a mannequin in my studio for a long time as the rest of the collection came about, so it’s funny that the collection became as spiritually tied as it ended up being,” said the designer. The capes were worn by both male and female models who came out in a group halfway through the show. The absolute star of the show was a group of gorgeous fine-tailored pieces, like the slightly asymmetrical double-breasted silk tuxedo jacket with a giant fabric rose on the left shoulder, worn with fluid satin trousers. The rose also appeared on red silk taffeta trousers, complete with a ball gown–esque train and paired with a black leather tank, and again on a pair of extra-wide black satin trousers and matching button-down shirt, worn open at the chest and falling off the shoulders. “I felt like this was a show about good and evil,” the designer added. “Coming from a religious background, I’ve always been a firm believer that good out-wins evil, [but] I felt like there’s almost a loss of God right now in the world.” If it’s true that God is love and beauty, then this fashion show took us a little closer to heaven.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Razzle Dazzle. Tom Ford SS23

September 16, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Tom Ford was in the headlines in July when it was reported that he was exploring the potential sale of his brand. The designer has said little in the months since, but industry talk has had it that the deal could be worth $3 billion. So it’s no wonder he put on the razzle dazzle for his New York Fashion Week finale show, packing the room with celebs – Madonna among them – and sending out a collection with Hollywood Boulevard and Elvis-in-Las-Vegas vibes, heavy on the pastel lamé, Nudie Suit-style embroideries, and black lingerie lace. Ford wrote the book of nudity – so trendy this season among other American designers – nearly 30 years ago. Spring-summer 2022 collection looked back on his different chapters, the sheer tees and black satin bra tops evoking a Gucci spring 2001 show, the deconstructed chiffon dresses reminiscent of a YSL outing for spring 2002. Friends and collaborators who have been with him since those days, like Carine Roitfeld, Elizabeth Saltzman, and Lisa Eisner, were in attendance, but he had things for the Instagram generation, too. A year ago he was talking about the ways in which social media has changed fashion, killing off subtlety in favor of high impact. The sequin patches decorating cargo shorts and the fringed cowboy shirts here certainly qualified. The menswear was slightly more tempered, but not entirely. A hot pink zoot suit was accompanied by a necktie that looked wider and shorter than recent examples. The lace boxers made made the audience scream.

For all the glossy surfaces and metallic shine, however, there was an undeniable melancholic undercurrent. When the daywear section concluded, a soundtrack of upbeat ’80s hits was swapped out for Freddie Mercury singing “Time Waits for No One.” Ford lost his husband Richard Buckley nearly a year ago. On Saturday, the photographer William Klein died, and this week the industry mourned Roxanne Lowit, who was among the first photographers to romance the behind-the-scenes action at runway shows. One of Lowit’s early subjects was Pat Cleveland, a frequent model for Yves Saint Laurent, and she was in the audience that evening, too. The pandemic has accelerated a generational shift the reverberations of which will only become more pronounced. Nothing stays the same, but Ford has his sexy extrovert signatures, and he’s sticking with them – all the way down to the cheeky lace underthings.