Slatterns and Angels. Andreas Kronthaler Vivienne Westwood SS23

October 4, 2022October 10, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2023, Andreas Kronthaler was in philosophical form. He reported that until his arrival in Paris a few days ago, he’d not been out of London in more than a year. Instead he had stayed at home and read and designed. The book that hit him hardest was Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. That text on the great metaphysical poet, who saw lovers’ eyes as hemispheres and clothes as states of mind, helped fire this collection. The ragged tricolored cardigan of look 16 and the soulful accordion on the soundtrack signaled Kronthaler’s enchantment at this Paris return. More broadly we were on an imaginative trip through various characters shaped through clothing. Sibyl Buck was particularly magnificent in her two broad-shoulder, Renaissance-man looks. There were slatterns and angels, monks and harlots, nobles and commoners. The models all wore super-high, Vivienne Westwood-signature platforms that even Donne would have struggled to describe. The only missing element was Westwood herself, whom her husband said was back in London taking part in a wave of protests against the government.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

Women dresses

Back To The 1980s. Junya Watanabe SS23

October 4, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The three Comme Des Garçons brands have finally returned to the Parisian schedule: Junya Watanabe, Noir Kei Ninomiya and CDG itself. Lately, Watanabe loves a theme to stick with for an entire season, so for spring-summer 2023 we went back to 1980s. The familiar flashing camera sounds of Duran Duran’s hit “Girls on Film” kicked in and a pair of New Romantic kids emerged from the side of the runway, their hair crimped into mohawks and wedges and their makeup airbrushed on like a Patrick Nagel portrait. All of that was enriched with Junya’s signature codes, from deconstructed tailoring to the punk-rock badassery of chains and pearls. Those first two looks set the silhouette: wide, very-1980s-shouldered capes and a skinny leg punctuated by a sharp-toed boot dressed up with those chains and pearls. Some of the capes were caught by a belt in the front or cut like a trad two-button blazer, but turn them around and it was a different story: all swagger and sweeping shapes, punctuated by fabric selvedge. Shirting got the Junya treatment too; split personality button-downs were well fit on one side and unstructured on the other, a clutch of pearls holding them in place, while pleated shirtdresses came in Klaus Nomi–ish inverted triangles. About those pearls: they were worn as necklaces and integrated into garments, almost like belts, creating the kind of askew volumes Watanabe likes. He seemed to be making a case for more glamour and more drama, but without disconnecting from the realities of daily life. The jeans, whose upturned cuffs revealed a flash of red tartan, were made with Levi’s, and the color-blocked and patchwork jackets came together with Komine, a Japanese racing-gear maker.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

Layers. Victoria Beckham SS23

October 4, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Spring-summer 2023 collection was Victoria Beckham‘s runway debut in Paris. But also, it was one of the least consistent offerings coming from the designer. This makes me wonder: for whom is this brand for at that very moment? And what does it really stand for? The collection wasn’t bad, but it felt like it tried to check all the current trends. The first look: Rianne Van Rompaey in a medical-pink rigorous, ankle-length dress sheathed over her body, its sleeves slit to the shoulder, its waist stitched at the front and pulled apart with strict ruching. Beckham underpinned it with opera gloves in monogrammed lace the color of the model’s skin, matching tights, and high satin heels with almond-shaped toes. It was pretty twisted, but glamorous. The designer could stay in the orbit of this look. But she decided to experiment further. Draped dresses (some seedily worn over latex tights), deconstructed cami dresses that looked as if they were about to slip off the body, and perversely bias-cut fishtail gowns in more medical pastels. A black dress was adorned in slashes as if it had been clawed into. Next to coats with edges cut to reveal their construction and trompe l’oeil leather jackets with the imprint of lapels, tailored jackets had been deconstructed at the back and reduced to their core frame, exposing the naked body (very Peter Do). Each look put separately seemed intriguing, but in overall, the line-up needed a tighter edit.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

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.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!

Natural-Fake, Real-Artificial. Loewe SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

After his terrific JW Anderson show in London, I was sure that we’re not ready for what’s coming at Loewe. Jonathan Anderson‘s spring-summer 2023 collection hits different. After questioning the fakeness behind our screens, here he set out to explore the fake in nature. A giant fiberglass anthurium grew out of a hole in the floor in his show location, and he adapted the unreal-looking flower for clothing, molding bodices that wrapped around the torso and bra cups out of the suggestive blooms. These were not femme fleurs in the way fashion used to conceive of the term – for one thing the anthurium’s nubbly spadix looks like nothing so much as an erect phallus; for another the flower is poisonous. The women who will wear these dresses fancy themselves more dangerous than dainty. There’s a new element of provocation to Anderson’s work since the pandemic. And a sense of idiosyncratic, Loewe community: Dev Hynes, Caroline Polachek, Hari Nef in the front row, and on the runway in look 1, Taylor Russell, who stars alongside Timothée Chalamet in the Luca Guadagnino (also present in the f-row) film Bones and All. Russell wore a breath-taking strapless black velvet dress with panniers jutting out from the hips, a silhouette lifted out of the Baroque period via the 1920s robe de style that is once again appearing on the runways. Anderson revisited it in three other colors. Repetition was a motif in and of itself here. There was another quartet of strange dresses whose fronts were swagged and suspended from triangular wire peaks that reached up toward the face. Still more short styles – you could hardly call them dresses – were made from enameled metal painted with flowers. As for the babyless baby carriers, they looked sort of like fabric-covered versions of the gold breastplates that made such an impression on the Loewe runway a year ago. It all goes back to the anthurium flower, which Anderson’s show notes described as “a product of nature that looks like an object of design and [was] treated as such.” Another major highlight: couple of tops and trousers in the pixelated squares of Minecraft glitches. They were “this odd illusion that suddenly breaks the pattern,” like avatars from the virtual world made flesh. Real fakes. Anderson keeps pushing the limits.