New York

Glamour-To-Wear. Area AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Area’s Piotrek Panszczyk and Beckett Fogg continue to push the envelope with their made-to-wear glamour. Since launching the brand in 2013, the designers have done so much introspection and recalibration that it’s hard to know if it’s the go-to brand for haute space bitches, haunting Dadaist ghouls, pop star glamazons, or former first ladies. Ask Panszczyk and he’ll answer that the label has always been for everyone but the clothes didn’t always show it, seasonally skewing in favor of one audience while cutting out the rest. Panszczyk and Fogg took 2020 to recenter themselves and their brand, choosing to show in season and to make salability and creativity equal parts of their process. Not either/or but both. As Panszczyk explained over a Zoom call, their shoppers have just as much desire for a couture-grade crystal pantie as they do a pair of crystal-studded jeans. To meet their needs, Area presented its own kind of solution dressing this season, injecting glamour into normcore and normalcy into high-gloss glamorama. Jeans enter the picture in a medium-wash straight-leg style adorned with crystals and paired with a bitchy little bustier. Tweed suiting is cropped and shrunken, with rhinestone fringe falling from hems. A classic LBD comes in vinyl, and the brand’s famous pale pink lamé returns in the form of iridescent minidresses, corsets, and skirts. Knitwear is growing too, with pink and lime pieces dotted with tiny crystal bows. This new Area wardrobe captures the vixenish nature of the label without compromising on wearability; exactly the branding exercise a company needs to push it from emerging to established. But Panszczyk and Fogg are smart to not let their good business sense totally overshadow the weirdness that makes Area special. During the pandemic they connected with Chinese designer Dingyun Zhang, whose enormous puffer jackets have also caught the eye of Kanye West and his Yeezy team. After a couple DMs, the trio decided to collaborate, cropping Zhang’s puffers into cloudlike vests, bralettes, and skirts, and then tamping them down with Area’s crystal harnesses. The results are delightfully kooky, heavenly, and sensual all at once. Area’s year of questioning has yielded some good answers.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Curated Wardrobe. Maryam Nassir Zadeh Resort 2022

| Design & Culture by Ed

Contemporary, New York chic? It’s Maryam Nassir Zadeh‘s brand. The designer comes at her collections from multiple vantage points: as a designer, as a retailer (her Lower East Side store is set to reopen soon), and as a true lover of clothes. She has an epic personal archive filled with labels she discovered early on – Nassir Zadeh was one of the first New York stores to sell Jacquemus and Eckhaus Latta – as well as designer treasures and vintage finds she’s collected over the years. As for her brand’s archive, she’s been busy revisiting and editing every piece she’s ever made, plus dozens of prototypes and one-offs, to get it to a place that reflects her tastes today. Post-pandemic, she’s leaning more minimal, but not in a stark or staid way; there’s a delicateness to it, even in the menswear.  For resort 2022, she tried on almost every piece she’s kept, one by one, and re-cut the best ones to create the ultimate “curated” MNZ wardrobe. Her past few collections have followed a similar approach, initially due to the constraints of the pandemic; in 2020, her team didn’t have the resources to create brand-new samples with brand-new fabrics. But Zadeh didn’t think that resort would have turned out “better” if it was entirely new stuff. The time and care she put into hand-selecting the clothes – and occasionally redoing them in different colors or fabrics – amounted to a collection heartfelt and personal. Diehard fans might spot a few of her “greatest hits,” but Zadeh and her stylist, Thistle Brown, re-styled each piece so they’re hardly recognizable. Several dresses were transformed into skirts thanks to artful knots or belt bags around the waist, while a neon orange midi dress was shown with a full skirt underneath, sort of like a petticoat. Beyond showing you how to wear the new pieces, Zadeh hopes it will inspire her entire community to get more creative with their MNZ favorites at home. A few looks were styled with bikinis, now a brand signature, or asymmetrical bodysuits in mushroom-y colors. They lent an undone, balletic feeling to the skirts, sort of like a Lower East Side spin on a dancer’s uniform.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Lust For Essentials. The Row SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen are holding their course, even though most of the designers this season move towards a hedonist mode. Skimp is not in The Row’s vocabulary, and it isn’t likely to be in the future. None of us have been untouched by the pandemic, though, so how has the experience of lockdown changed the Olsens’ design POV and what does The Row’s take on re-emergence style look like? Something unexpected emerged most vividly midway through the lineup in the form of separates for women and men in shades of red and blue, the brightest colors ever to find their way into a collection from the Olsens, who prefer to work with neutrals and classic black and white. There were also the arty details here and there, like the delicate thread belt that accented the drawstring waist of a pair of casual pants or the fringed raw-edges of a fully knit skirt made with three different yarns. A few pieces were hand-painted, a nod, maybe, to the artists and art collectors that number among their clients. The accessories offering has expanded and there was a notable element of fun, as seen in the tiny card cases and coin purses suspended from belts and in the stretchy ankle boots that looked like a cross between scuba socks and wrestler shoes. Overall, the proportions are roomy and the silhouettes are layered – luxe comfort is the key. The Row fans will fall in love with a pair of pressed khakis whose low-slung, flared profile recalled the ’90s, and a jumpsuit with a tank top upper half that was the barest of all the looks assembled here. Pre- or post-pandemic, perfect essentials never go out of style.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Hello Happiness. Marc Jacobs AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Even though I was in the “out of office” mode for a week, hiking in the Polish mountains, I watched last week’s livestream of Marc Jacobs’ graceful runway come-back, and I couldn’t be happier. Jacobs hasn’t shown a collection since his spectacular autumn-winter 2020 presentation circa February of last year, choreographed by Karole Armitage and starring a corps of professional dancers backing up the likes of Miley Cyrus and Bella Hadid. The year-long break from fashion shows wasn’t only a time of changes for the brand, but also a much-needed pause for Marc himself. There were even rumours the designer would ditch the runway forever. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and here we are with this radiant, bold and strong line-up. What we got was Marc Jacobs couture, a bold statement about the dynamism and allure of dramatic mid-century and Space Age-y proportions, filtered through an American sportswear vernacular and put together with an eye to the assemblage style and rule-breaking of Gen Z. Jacobs has clearly been paying attention to the ins and outs of fashion: there were both ribbed knit bodysuits and holographic paillette dresses here, which alternately conjured lockdown homewear and reemergence proposals seen elsewhere. But this collection was less about where we’ve been or the current fashion conversation than it was a raising of the fashion bar, which I think makes it so, so special. It read as an endorsement of adventurous, even extravagant silhouettes: puffer hoods and snoods, cocoon coats, skirts over pants, and faux fur scarves that trailed behind the models like trains. On one side, there were chunky sweaters and almost iridescent ski pants; and on the other, bodysuits cut out at the sides and back worn with flat front midi skirts in Op Art intarsias. Fashion with capital F, yes please! Outsized outerwear was a big story, some with enormous block logos, another outlined with long fringe in the same sans serif shapes. When this collection arrives at Bergdorf Goodman (the legendary New York retailer is said to be exclusively carrying the runway offering) in the autumn these jackets and coats will command attention. Probably the most spectacular pair of looks came in black and white bias stripes: clingy quilted dresses, topped by a puffer bolero in one case and a puffer stole in another. Marc’s press-notes, which titled the collection as “Happiness”, emphasised that joyful feeling of fashion being fashion at its best. “On the journey back to doing what we love most, in the wake of immeasurable loss, loneliness, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, I am reminded of why creativity is so vital to our existence. To life,” he wrote. All this came in the lead-up to this September’s Costume Institute exhibition devoted to American design, and curator Andrew Bolton’s insistence that it – it being American fashion – is indeed as emotionally resonant as its European counterpart. And Marc Jacobs definitely keeps on leading the pack of contemporary fashion designers from the USA.

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.