Pre-Fall 2022

Tropiques. Diotima Pre-Fall 2022

| Design & Culture by Ed

Barely a year old, Rachel Scott’s brand, Diotima, is both a rich collaboration with and an homage to her home country, Jamaica. At her hands, crochet – crafted by a group of female artisans in Jamaica – is reimagined to unique effect and paired with coolly slouched tailoring. One thing that’s impressive about Scott is how she manages to make an oversized grandpa suit fit in with a barely-there crochet dress akin to a fishing net. She blends sexy and prim to interesting effect. This season, her new crochet dress is basically a tank top with really elongated straps, a waistband, and hand-applied crystals. The model wears it with nothing underneath, but a slip skirt would fit in just fine. The best suit is made from a laminated woven textile with a crochet appliqué on the leg; you get both a clash of textures and a flash of upper thigh. Scott has collaborated with Nadia Huggins, an artist from St. Vincent who takes arresting underwater photographs. They created a “Tropiques” print featuring a sea urchin, sand dollar, and snake on a soft woven fabric. “She thinks of her whole project as creating a new Caribbean archive and one that has a new subjectivity,” Scott says. In a typically cheeky move, one of the dresses totally covers the model from neck to wrist to ankle, save for a crochet panel across the bust and a super-high leg slit, but she also offers the print in more demure button-downs and a shin-length skirt. The sea motif continues in the use of moire and a sea urchin corset. Scott describes a pair of pants modeled after cricket uniforms, with shell-like pads on the knees, as a continuation of the Caribbean influences.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Hot Glam. Blumarine Pre-Fall 2022

| Design & Culture by Ed

Hello baby gorgeous, here’s some hot Blumarine pre-fall 2022! Having catapulted the Italian label in just three seasons from oblivion to the firmament of hot fashion brands, creative director Nicola Brognano keeps on fueling the craze for the 2000s – and he isn’t planning to change that anytime soon. “It’s a territory I feel very confident exploring,” said the designer, who was born in 1990 and thus is quite knowledgeable on the matter. So, apart from the Paris-Britney-Lindsay trifecta, who’s the new high-wattage 2000s muse? “Gisele Bündchen,” he answered. “Gisele was stratospheric, gorgeousness incarnate, she still is. That sexiness brasileira. Who’s the woman who doesn’t want to be her, yesterday, today, or tomorrow?” The thing is, the Blumarine girl isn’t such a naughty teenager anymore: “She doesn’t sit in her bedroom combing her hair in front of the mirror listening to Shakira or Beyoncé,” Brognano said. “Now she wants to get out of the house, basta.” Teenager or not, she’s very much the agent provocateur. Enveloped in a flame-red cashmere fur with a leopard-print lining, worn over a flame-red tightly draped miniskirt not wider than a belt, and a matching ribbed brassiere, she’s ready to stop traffic the minute she bids goodbye to her bedroom. For pre-fall, Brognano provided variations on the theme: plenty of exposed midriffs, bare legs, and alluring décolletage options. He also upped the dramatic ante a notch. Tight cargo pants were cut in pink, low-slung bell bottoms were made in brash golden leather; stretchy, drapey, slinky minidresses with asymmetrical, slashed hems were rendered in both black and “mean florals.” Glamorous faux furs in icy white were printed with a lynx spot, giving off a luxurious, sexy vibe. That’s hot.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Less Is (Really) More. Victoria Beckham Pre-Fall 2022

| Design & Culture by Ed

It’s no secret that Victoria Beckham‘s brand had some rough time financially. Wisely, the company scaled-down to its main line, at the same time incorporating a lower price point and limiting the range of new products. Looking at Beckham’s pre-fall 2022 offering, this new approach has a positive effect on the designs. Less is really more. We’ve got great, business-ready tailoring, a fine balance of neutrals and neons (Victoria certainly understands that a wardrobe has to offer different attitudes, depending on the wearer’s ever-changing mood), and languid dresses that come with sexy zip details and erotic cut-outs. All the clothes have that kind of smart discipline about them, which makes it additonally appealing for clients who want to finally exit the too-easy comfort zone of dressing caused by months (actually… years) spent in the pandemic world. And even if the pandemic will last forever, at some point we will all want to dress up a bit more demandingly – even if it’s for another Zoom call.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Signatures. Thom Browne Pre-Fall 2022

| Design & Culture by Ed

People might find Thom Browne’s work monotonous, if they look at it superficially. Gray wool suit, pleated skirt, rakish tie – these distinct Browne signatures are always there. However, Browne rarely does the same thing twice. Sure, he has a very stable gray wool core, but each season he delights in trying out an outrageous new silhouette, a clever in-joke, or a cheeky rethink of an American staple. While this women’s collection carries over motifs from Browne’s men’s pre-fall, including lovely jade floral intarsias inspired by his bedroom wallpaper and a fixation with lobsters resulting in an exceptional Shetland wool lobster skirt – he introduced new whimsical proportions here. A cropped puffer was so short and bulbous it almost looked like a mushroom cap atop slender black trousers. Browne has never made a womenswear silhouette that exaggerates the upper body in this abbreviated way before. Elsewhere, khaki shorts do the opposite for a woman’s lower half; they’re cut wide, loose, and sexless enough to look dementedly funny. The signature Browne suit has evolved, as well: The shoulderpads and the canvas are cut out of the brand’s cropped blazer so that it’s as soft and snuggly as a cardigan, constructed from an elegant black-and-white tweed. The check gray skirt suit in look 28 might seem standard, but look closer and Browne is doing something strangely new: here is a single-breasted blazer with a vest long enough to be worn as a dress and a loose, almost shapeless skirt. For a designer with famously strict tailoring, silhouettes that skim the body and waft in the breeze are practically revelatory. Browne says the suit is “the most important look” of the collection, unlocking an idea that will carry to the silhouettes we’ll see in his autumn-winter 2022 outing in a couple of weeks.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Utilitarian Romanticism. Erdem AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

In his second menswear collection, Erdem Moralioglu goes for streetwear – something you never see in his often dramatic women’s offering. “Utilitarian romanticism” is how the London-based designer summed up his newest creative venture. He has a point: in a world where people wear couture-house joggers to dinner, and even Moralioglu surrenders to sporty dress codes, streetwear is really just daywear. “It’s a boiled fleece hoodie with a tailored, nipped jogger,” he said of the collection’s most informal look, describing those garments exactly like he would his ladylike womenswear. But unlike that womenswear Erdem’s men’s world has a relaxed, almost light-hearted quality about it. The designer has been living in the spring men’s collection since he received the first pieces, and, as he confirmed, “it’s very personal.” While the first collection only started to arrive in stores in November, his recipe of ravishingly-colored knits, corduroy, and printed denim has seen great response from the yet-to-be-defined Erdem men’s customer, and has gone down well with his trusty female clientele, too. This season, he took inspiration from the work of two women, who may as well have played muses to one of his women’s collections: Madame d’Ora, a Viennese portrait photographer and contemporary of Picasso, and Madame Yevonde, a portrait and still-life photographer who worked in London around the interwar era. Together, their subjects, grading techniques, and the latter’s use of color inspired a 1930s-driven collection, which borrowed from the women’s wardrobe of the time, and fused those references in Moralioglu’s contemporary “utilitarian romanticism.” What emerged through Moralioglu’s second menswear proposal was a men’s wardrobe of conventional contradictions: feminine vs. masculine, formal vs. informal, Old World vs. new world. Those dichotomies are hardly new territory in menswear, but through the lens of Erdem – with all its history and romanticism – this menswear brand already feels unique and familiar in a way that gives it a character of its own on a very saturated market.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.