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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Hot Versatility. Peter Do SS23

September 15, 2022September 15, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Peter Do has delivered one of the most convincing, coherent and desirable collections of this entire New York Fashion Week. If Helmut Lang, the designer, showed collections in 2022, then this might have been the effect – it’s this good. What gave Do this sort of new confidence is the official launch of menswear. The spring-summer 2023 show was opened with a men’s look: the double breasted jacket fastened with a single button over a white shirt, both with a large triangle cutout exposing a flash of muscled back, over a pair of full satin pants with open side seams that tapered at the ankle over those signature boots. The model was Lee Jeno of the K-Pop group NCT who has 3.4 million followers on Instagram. Celebrity influencers will play their part, but more important: Do’s exacting, even methodical approach is equal to his ambition. As with his women’s, tailoring is central to Do’s aesthetic. In fact, the offering is more or less unisex, in addition to being quite sexy. “During the fitting process we try everything on both, 80% is pretty genderless,” he explained. For him, for her, for them: over the course of 60 looks – this was one of New York’s bigger shows – Do set out his vision. It involves deconstruction in the form of suits slit open at the hem to reveal their inner workings, minimal leaning ornamentation like tone-on-tone suture stitches over seams, and the two- or three-in-one versatility that he’s built into his work from the start. Waistbands can be adjusted to accommodate different sized hips and clever pleated skirts are attached to belts so they can be open and closed, almost like curtains. Shirts can play it straight, meaning buttoned from collar to hem, or they can be worn wrapped around the waist for the undone look he favored here. Another novelty, this one on the sustainable tip: a tank and pants in what looked like patent leather were made from discarded shrimp shells, a food industry waste product.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Sunlight. Marni SS23

September 12, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The appearance of Italian brands on the New York Fashion Week schedule brought major action to the city. First Fendi kicked off the fashion marathon. Then, Marni‘s Francesco Risso delivered one of his finest collections for the brand to date. Making Marni’s NYC debut on a Brooklyn street nestled under a bridge, the trains audibly rumbling overhead, was a natural step for Risso, who has appreciated the city’s creative spirit for years. Everyone from Paloma Elsesser to Tyler Mitchell to Lara Stone appeared on the runway; a cast of models and friends walked to a live soundtrack written by Dev Hynes and performed by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn. Gorgeous, hallucinogenic, searingly bright colors; distressed mohair; papery leathers; mystical cobwebs of beads; and psychedelic panne velvets, the pieces punctuated every now and then by enormous and the chicest-ever squashy courier bags, their no-nonsense utilitarian shape turned off-kilter by their puffy aeration. The collection was a signature Marni line-up, but also felt very new-gen New York. “I’ve been wanting to explore for a while,” Risso said. “It means understanding things from a different perspective, connecting with different people. It feels refreshing. There’s a lot of learning as well, and I’m up for that every fucking second. Ever since America opened its borders last December I’ve been here, I don’t know, maybe 20 times. Still,” he went on, “it’s not really news, because everyone is out in some other realm in some way or other.”

Risso’s arrival stateside feels like it comes from a place of curiosity, of challenge, of risk: how can we get out of the moribund, straight-back-to-business way of doing things? The answer: maybe destabilize and decentralize it all, stop putting the designer on a pedestal, start to rethink all the relationships between brand, creator, audience, and those actually buying the stuff. Come together, join forces. “It’s not the ’90s anymore,” he said, “when brands spoke in very defined ways. Now you have to talk universally.” In regard to that last assertion, with his spring 2023 collection, Risso put his clothes where his mouth is. With a color palette inspired by the changing light over the course of a day in the Italian countryside (something he observed while holidaying in his homeland), he offered up a strong lineup that felt more streamlined and minimalistic than those he has done lately, despite the intense colorations and textures going on. Filmy rib knits contoured close to the body, some with “sleeves” trailing from the waistband or extra neckholes, which created circular décolleté cutouts, regardless of the gender wearing them. “The body is completely the protagonist in this collection,” Risso said. “Everything is built in jerseys, knitwear, things that, actually, go with the body rather than against it. Even the leather is the softest leather that exists.” The collection had other conceits based on the circle, be it the swooping looped trains on the dresses or the groovy abstract sunrises rendered on satin tees and minidresses. As for Risso, he is already thinking about where on earth the sun might rise on his next Marni collection. He’s in no rush to go back to Milan, not until the brand’s 30th anniversary in 2024 at least. Travel does more than just broaden the mind, in his view. “I can’t wait to be on the other side of the planet,” he said, “but, also, to see how it can burst the bubbles that we like to create in fashion.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Tableau Vivant. KidSuper SS23

August 20, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Look 21 in KidSuper‘s spring-summer 2023 collection – a half-realized, elusive portrait on a pink sweater and pale cords – was based on an original painting called Con Artist. It was one of 23 Colm Dillane paintings, which in turn inspired the 23 looks in his KidSuper collection that were auctioned off by Christie’s Lydia Fenet live during his show. As each model walked, the audience had its chance to bid. The big spender was Russ – a close friend of Dillane – who apparently walked away with several paintings including the night’s headline sale, The Girl That Breathes Life Into The Inanimate (Lot and Look 23). After a fierce bidding war, Fenet eventually banged her gavel after Russ’s $210,000 bid went unmatched. In total, the paintings ‘sold’ for $529,000. This was all in itself a piece of performance art designed ingeniously to stretch the boundaries of the fashion show as visual theater. Dillane said afterwards that as he’d prepared for his first on-schedule Paris show, he’d been to some others and had been struck by the divide between audience and subject. “And I was like, how do I get people to interact and participate, and make it an experience. And I had always wanted to do an art show as a fashion show. And thinking about participation in an art show, that’s where the auction idea came from.” The auction was designed to animate the fashion show through artistic intervention. It was clever, fun, and funny. Apart from the clues to the process we were subject to in the names of some of the paintings, Fenet – who is absolutely masterful at extracting serious sums of money with the lightest of rhetorical touches – was apparently representing an auctioneer named Superby’s. We got no indication of her commission. When the final painting – named The Finale – emerged stretched on its frame, there was a hole where the on-canvas face of one of its subjects “should” have been. A model’s painted face loomed through it. Just as Fenet’s gavel went down, the canvas whisked from the frame to reveal itself as the upper layer in her tulle pentimento dress. This show raised many interesting ideas, including the notion of clothing reproduced with original artworks acting as wearable editions of those pieces.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Natural Allure. Brioni SS23

August 19, 2022August 20, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Norbert Stumpfl came across a mid-’50s newspaper with pictures of Brioni’s collections of that time: “They looked incredibly modern,” he said during his spring-summer 2023 presentation. ”They made tailored jackets out of jersey, trousers in leather, traditional masculine suits were made with sumptuous women’s evening wear fabrics.” This spirit of modernity is what he wanted to propose in the spring collection, presented in the verdant private cloisters in one of the hidden locations Milan is famous for. Expanding on the idea of individuality, Stumpfl offered an anecdote: “One of our young clients choose a pale pink suit to propose in,” he said. “It made me so happy, it felt so nice, and it was proof that Brioni is the go-to label to celebrate the most special and intimate moments.” The sentimental gesture of the young customer inspired him to draw the line: for spring, he said, “no business, no ties, but supple, formally informal tailoring for young men.” Playing on subtle contrasts, pajama suits were made in silk knitwear; blousons in matte crocodile felt as malleable as jumpers; a shirt’s fabrication, light as air, was used for an equally weightless unlined soft tailored suit. Reprising the house’s tradition of using women’s fabrications for menswear, a trench coat was made in satin de cuir, a heavenly smooth, sumptuous fabrics with a discreet, inconspicuous shine. Stretching the remarkable skills of Brioni’s tailors and artisans, a three-pieces suit was entirely made by hand as if it were a couture piece. But the jewels in the collection’s crown were the evening tuxedos, made in precious silk jacquard woven on antique looms by Setificio Leuciano, an historic artisanal company which was purveyor to the Royal Palace of Caserta. The edited women’s offer was as elegant and breezy as the men’s, with masculine silk shirts elongated to become a dress worn over soft straight pants, and ankle-grazing evening coats impeccably cut. Brioni is imbued with a quintessentially Roman mindset: lightness of spirit, a perfect eye for beauty, and the natural allure of nonchalance which comes from millennia of proximity with the world’s most stunning artifacts.