Mud Show. Balenciaga SS23

October 3, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

When Balenciaga invited its guests to a “mud show“, they meant it literally. There were tons of mud on the spring-summer 2023 runway, piled up at the sides of the stadium space, and dug out like bomb craters in the center, staged by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. The raw odeur of decomposition, a custom-made scent by Sissel Tolaas, blasted in the face. Demna did it yet again: he shook up the fashion industry like no one else, reminding about rising inequality, the return of fascism, wars happening all over the globe, and the very real threat of nuclear war. Kanye West opened the show in a tactical jacket and leather pants with reinforced knees, military garb topped off with a baseball cap and a logo mouthguard. The ragtag band that followed was rough around the edges to say the least, their faces beat-up and their clothes treated to look old and beat-up too (requiring a “couple of days” more than making pristine luxury, Demna said). Some carried bags made from stuffed animals that looked like they’d been through a war. When the 75 models made their circuit on the wet track, dirt splashed their bare ankles and soaked their hems, the 3-D printed Dutch clogs being no match for the mud. Demna has had his own experience of war – he fled Georgia with his family when he was a young boy of 10. Being gay compounded his struggles. “I’ve felt like I’ve been punched in my face for being who I am,” he said, but “you have to stand up and continue walking, kind of like this crusade of discovering who you are and defending that.” He called this a “very me show.” It was heavy on grafitti’d hoodies and ravaged jeans, but there was also evening wear, in clingy T-shirt jersey or glamorous pleats. These were survivors against the odds, a point Demna made by sending out men clutching baby carriers propped with eerily lifelike dolls. “Naturally I’m an optimist, but I cannot be very optimistic right now,” he said. “I think this show actually expresses that very much – the music, the set, it spoke about the moment in which we live.” To finish, Demna sent out a dress made from cut-up parts of black Balenciaga Lariat bags, a make-do-and-mend masterpiece that also pointed up our nasty overconsumption habits. Remember, he sent every last piece through the mud, a “sacrilege” by luxury standards. Using fashion to comment on the crises that plague us is a tricky business. Of course Demna wants us to shop, and of course his bosses do, too. But when it comes time to spend, my money’s on the guy who looks around and is terrified, not the sleepwalkers.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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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.
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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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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City Warrior. Isabel Marant SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s one of those Isabel Marant collections which she might have designed with her eyes closed. And there’s nothing bad about it. This super chic, super Parisian, super effortless Marant look is eternal. For spring-summer 2023, she doubled down on that approach, with a look that was abbreviated, exuberant, and went from soft to tough – often in the same outfit. The designer clearly went back to basics, as it were, revisiting the moment when she started her label in the mid-’90s through to the dawn of the 2000s. There was a new mood in the air then, streetwise and raw, but also with a kind of world-weary, knowing charm. It was a moment when a different kind of woman – a little grunge, a little boho, a whole lot cool – made herself known. “I wanted to go back to a certain fragility of femininity, but still keeping in mind the Isabel Marant woman, who is a bit of a city warrior,” said the designer. She referenced the work of the brilliant late photographer Corinne Day, who pretty much photographed Kate Moss before anyone else, but who also, importantly, spent her sadly all too brief career photographing women as they would like to be seen themselves. You could also say that that’s quintessential Marant: a label where women can see themselves in it. The very personal era that Marant revisited was writ large in this collection. Racer cut tanks and swingy little dresses in patchwork configurations of metallic-threaded floral silk chiffon came with zippered leather minis and moto pants that had been washed and washed to get the perfect lived-in patina. Laser-cut suede jackets were as long as the shorts and fluttery skirts they were worn with. Camo looked as if it had been sun-bleached, cut into an oversized jacket or cargo pants, another from the Marant arsenal of killer trousers. And to underscore what makes Isabel Marant, the woman and the label, tick, there was a profusion of artisanal detailing, from the tiny seed pearls sprinkled across an organdy camisole, to the macramé threaded across an organza blouse.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Killer Chic. Schiaparelli SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Daniel Roseberry has rounded the three-year mark at Schiaparelli. From Lady Gaga at the inauguration and Bella Hadid in Cannes to an exhibition at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, his first cycle has been a smash. “The past three years we’ve been building this reputation, this language through the couture and the red carpet,” he said. “The next three will be about building the business side of it too.” The task at hand, Roseberry acknowledged, is holding onto the excitement and exclusivity that surrounds Schiap as Surrealism goes more mainstream and the brand becomes more accessible. “I don’t want it to become a schtick,” he said. Grabbing the world’s attention is easier than keeping it, as any old hand in fashion will tell you. But Roseberry is approaching the task well fortified. The ready-to-wear’s backbone is tailoring – quite literally in the case of a jacket embellished with ribs, after a famous Elsa Schiaparelli skeleton dress suit circa 1938. Others are accessorized by the body-part baubles – eyes, noses, pierced nipples – that are Roseberry’s inventions and have become the identifying markers of the label. “The more extraordinary, the more luxurious, the more exquisite, the more people are inclined to buy,” Roseberry said of his suits. The denim hews to the same more-is-more formula; the dusting of gold sequins across the backside of a pair of jeans, designed to look like sand on the bum, was especially inspired. An evening capsule was born from a summer holiday in Italy, where Roseberry saw women sunbathing in solid-colored swimsuits and big, bold jewelry. He re-created the look here via a brown halter dress suspended from a gold neck plate with a kiss in the middle, and a hooded dress in the brightest red silk jersey. There’s a direct line from Elsa’s skeleton suit through Yves Klein’s body paintings, which once inspired Phoebe Philo at Céline, to Roseberry’s own interpretations, painted in gold on an icy blue column. No schtick here. Just (killer) chic.