Raw Emotional State. Eckhaus Latta AW23

February 13, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jon Gries – aka The White Lotus‘ Greg – cameo in Eckhaus Latta‘s autumn-winter 2023 fashion show caused a social media hysteria. Is this how Greg lives his life after Tanya’s death on that unfortunate boat trip, walking the runway for New York’s coolest designers and just minding his own business wearing a chunky knitted sweater and a pair of very good-looking linen cargo pants? Nobody ever predicted Greg would become a fashion darling. Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta know a thing about creating fashion moments, without ever ignoring the clothes and their mind-blowing execution. The new collection came from a raw emotional state, and you could tell that. Jersey dresses, tops, and jackets had inside-out seams that were left unfinished to create little horizontal slashes across the body; layered black mesh dresses and shirts made from cotton had a coarser, more natural hand that felt less plastic-y against the body. Tops made from shearling were left unfinished to show their beauty in a natural state. “This season there was a want for a certain kind of hardness,” Eckhaus said. “There’s a kind of moodiness, not in a pessimistic way, but maybe on edge, an uneasy feeling that we are curious to play with,” Latta continued. The clothes felt urgent. This was a collection about protection, defiance, and most importantly, control, but as the show progressed, the color palette began shifting away from darkness. A moss green overcoat gave way to a brown and green pieced shearling top worn with a pair of wide leg jeans with painted stripes in shades of green, blue, orange and black, and shoes decked out in primary colors. A gorgeous pink oversized bomber jacket was hand knit in Bolivia and paired with a wide wale corduroy skirt of the same shade that zipped off at the front and back. “We’re thinking of things that come together and come apart, and letting things be mutable as garments,” Eckhaus said. The journey towards the light continued with a natural linen button down tucked into a matching wrap skirt of asymmetrical length. Some of the best looks in the collection came out towards the end, like the pieces made from a sort of coated gray vinyl which takes on a marbleized effect through regular wear and tear. That was turned into dresses and skirts and, most winningly, a really great pair of jeans. Each season, Eckhaus Latta includes a poem or a text in their show notes. This season’s ended with “Be Fluidly Brutal and Find God.” Interpret it the way you feel like it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Stages Of Life. Area SS23

February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Lately, Area becomes more and more experimental, transforming its “occasion-wear” into something conceptual, even metaphysical (through a slightly ironical, tongue-in-cheek lens). The noise of flies buzzed through speakers as the guests waited for the spring-summer 2023 show to start. The invitation came in the shape of two, fake squishy bananas. “This season is all about fruits,” Piotrek Panszczyk said before the show at his studio in Chinatown. “The beauty of them, but also the symbolic meaning of them. In a way you can think of fruit as something fresh, a new start, but when it starts decaying, it becomes about mortality.” And so the show opened with sculptural banana looks: a cropped top and a skirt made of oversized banana sculptures, followed by a jacket with banana sculptures surrounding the bodice, followed by a strapless denim mini dress, all in tie-dye shades of pink, purple, and white which were meant to mimic the colors of bruised, rotten fruit. The next dress was made of small, individually draped and formed banana shapes that were joined together in the style of a bandage-dress, hugging the body and leaving nothing to the imagination. While there were many sculptural pieces on the runway, it was indeed in the softness that Panszczyk found the most success.“This season there’s way more fluidity, we’re all about construction. We really started lightening it up, using laces, and fluid fabrics. Example: the red strapless empire waist flocked tulle gown with black lurex whose pattern brought to mind squashed grapes when wine is being made. Another highlight of the show was its diverse cast, which featured a few older models as well as a few “curvier” models, the latter wearing tailored gowns which hugged their bodies in the right places. “Aging also comes with beauty,” Panszczyk explained. “And I think for us it’s always important to showcase these different stages of life.” He added, “for us, it’s really about balancing these ideas, like how can it be about really, truly fantasy? And how can you evoke this kind of energy in real life?”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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A New York Moment. Proenza Schouler AW23

February 12, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

What a New York moment. Chloe Sevigny opened the autumn-winter 2023 Proenza Schouler show. She’s worn Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s clothes since the beginning, even a couple of times to Met Gala; they were New York ingenues together 20 years ago. But this wasn’t an anniversary show, the designers insisted. They said they’ve been taking stock, thinking about the friends and customers they’ve made over two decades. “This is our most personal collection yet,” said McCollough. “It was less revolving around a theme, more looking at the actual women in our lives: What is it they want?” Like Sevigny and Olympia Scarry, who walked later a few looks later, the women in McCollough and Hernandez’s lives have grown up, and grown out of some of the Proenza Schoulerisms they’ve honed over the years. Prints were kept to a minimum here. The ones that did turn up were remnants from past collections, and only appeared as the linings of dresses, visible through a side-slit in the midi-length skirt, or on straps pulled off the shoulders and left to peplum at the waist. There was no room for ruffles or bows, either. The only real embellishment they used was white pom pom fringe on a black velvet dress, but it was mostly obscured by the charcoal wool skirt that their stylist Camilla Nickerson, another friend they mentioned by name, layered over it. Other signatures stayed in the picture, but in updated versions. A pair of narrowly cut velvet shirt dresses made with dyed ice cubes that dripped their deep colors from neck to hem were evocative of their best-selling velvet tie-dye dresses of 2018, only subtler, more adult. The spongy, stretchy evening numbers with the sequins “baked in” were elaborations of simpler t-shirt dresses from a couple of pre-collections ago. In the studio Hernandez said, “it’s about using our ingredients and not throwing it all out and starting from scratch every season.” If you looked closely you could see that the short sleeves were differently shaped. Other knits were constructed in a similarly askew way; they twisted across the body, elevating them out of the ordinary. Over sounds by the musician Arca, Sevigny’s voice was on the soundtrack, reading “diary entries” written by the author Ottessa Moshfegh, with whom they’ve collaborated before, “kind of like an inner monologue.” Clothes-wise, the idea was to make an art of the everyday. By adding vertical zippers to the back of blazers that flashed a hint of skin but also enhanced ease of movement, by whipping up a hoodie in the softest, plushest knit, and by cutting “jeans” in a glossy gold leather, a nod to Helmut Lang, a few of whom’s runway looks were surely pinned to the mood board along with photos of their Sevigny et al.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Total Magic. Rodarte AW23

February 12, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rodarte‘s return to New York Fashion Week was a magical treat we all needed. A banquet was set with candle-lit chandeliers, baskets of fruits, and multi-tiered cakes, all covered in silver glitter and placed on silver tablecloths. This was a brunch for Rodarte fairies that were about to fly down the runway. “For whatever reason, this season we were like, ‘we wanna do something inspired by fairies.’” Laura and Kate Mulleavy explained. “Our mom’s an artist so we asked her, ‘Can you draw us some fairies?’” She did. Her colored pencil illustrations were then blown up and placed across airy caftans with feather or ruffled chiffon trims. Very whimsy and very witchy, as well as weird and romantic. This being a Rodarte show, the fairies weren’t just fairies. They were gothic fairies (in Siouxsie Sioux-inspired eye makeup and black lipstick). Laura and Kate have always had a penchant for finding beauty in darkness, but the darkness wasn’t so much horror as it was maybe a sense of time that’s passed. But whatever it was, the gothic fairies led the Mulleavys to a collection full of glamorous evening gowns. A series of languid jersey numbers with dramatic bell sleeves opened the show. They were followed by different versions in burnout velvet, embellished with sequins or with floral appliqués, the sleeves dragging shredded cheese cloth that had been dyed black; one of the designers’ favorite old techniques that they brought back this season. The Mulleavys also brought back their signature cobweb knits, made by hand from a collage of materials and textures: the one in shades of yellow with bits of silver felt joyous. Elsewhere, black satin bias-cut dresses had a 1930s feel with Victorian details like V-shaped lace insets, velvet mutton-sleeve bodies with white lace trim, and white lace capelets. Four models wore bulbous shapes made entirely from metallic fringe. They were powerful and fun, and the way they caught the light as the models walked down the runway brought an element of whimsy and fantasy to the collection. The silver one was added to the lineup last minute, after the silver banquet was suggested for the set design. “You have to stay open; every day you have a new creative point and until the last minute you’re still pushing to make it better and more your story,” Laura said. She was talking about the silver gown, but she could’ve been speaking about their creative approach as a whole. “This show, to me, is exactly who we are as designers,” Kate added.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Cupid’s Door. Alexander Wang AW23

February 9, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

And just like that, it’s New York Fashion Week. The first show on the schedule, at least for a brief moment, made you feel like in the old days. 10 years ago, in 2013, Alexander Wang‘s show was also an opener in New York’s biggest fashion event. Anna Wintour sat in the f-row, hot music was bumping all over the rave-y venue, Instagram was just starting to be a thing, TikTok was non-existent. Wang was the city’s favourite fashion darling – and he was about to show his first collection for Balenciaga in Paris (anyone remembers that?). But we are in 2023, and the world-wide mood is different, even if NYFW does it best to look like in the pre-pandemic times. And Alexander Wang is no longer a new-gen designer with no controversies attached to his name.

In between May 2019, the time of Wang’s last NYFW show, and now, the designer faced allegations of sexual misconduct that threw the future of his business into question. He made a public apology and his accusers announced they were “moving forward“. He put on a show in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in April of 2022. Honestly, nobody cared to look at it. Yesterday’s New York comeback had a dramatic tension: will anyone care this time? It seems the fashion world forgave Wang, and the designer somehow managed to dive back into the city’s scene of good PR and viral people. A promo spot on his Instagram Reels starring Anna Delvey, the socialite fraudster under house arrest in an East Village apartment, seemed to suggest he wasn’t proceeding from a chastened place. Cheeky is more like it. That fits with the collection’s theme. He gave it a name, Cupid’s Door, and dressed the location in boudoir-ish style, with dusty pink velvet curtains and a mesmeric zebra-stripe carpet; lighting gels that cast a red glow over the whole place. Sexy is enjoying a comeback of its own in the wake of the pandemic. Julia Fox walked the show dressed in a barely-there nude dress and and man’s jacket, like the modern-day version of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex & The City‘s season 1. Lace-edged camisoles, low-slung python print pants, boxer briefs peeking over the tops of waistbands – all of that was here, too. No sight of novelty, clearly. Rather, a lot of ideas many other designers in New York went through in the last couple of seasons.

The show was divided into three acts: the opening women’s section featured a lot of denim and faux fur in a variety of textures and silhouettes, very downtown style. Backstage he mentioned Wong Kar Wai films like 2046 and In the Mood for Love, which might have prompted the dressy vibes. Next came a men’s grouping that was quite cool and simple: athleisure-y items like sweatpants and sweatshirts in soft, high pile fabrics, alongside cropped vests and more animal print pants. The ending was the weakest point of the collection. A series of silk fringe dresses suspended from heart shapes built on a foundation of sheer net that revealed as much as they concealed. Eveningwear was never Wang’s thing, and that previously mentioned short stint at Balenciaga didn’t help with crafting that. The thing is, the tumultuous period the designer went through eventually revealed the basic fact that fashion has dozens of other designers who can fill the “sexy” niche in a much better and fresher way than Wang. The autumn-winter 2023 line-up had its ups, but in overall, it seems to be nothing more than Insta-friendly styling.