Anniversary. Rosie Assoulin Resort 2024

June 8, 2023June 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

With resort 2024 collection, Rosie Assoulin celebrates the 10 year anniversary of her brand. Time flies! I remember seeing the New York-based designer’s first collections and being absolutely seduced by her playful approach to eveningwear (we officially said goodbye to body-con styles and the notion of a “cocktail dress”), her colourist sensitivity, and the charming quirk that defines her signature style and fresh take on femininity. Observing Rosie’s work today, you have the same impression as 10 years ago: she’s a designer that marches to the beat of her own drum, who keeps her brand relevant, yet attractively off-the-mainstream-grid. The New York-ness that oozes from Assoulin’s fashion also plays a crucial role in her aesthetic. There’s just something very Park Avenue about her statuesque, origami-like gowns with harp bustiers, and then you’ve got a pin-striped suit that’s so laid-back it would work perfect for both, the office and a run to your favorite bodega. Resort 2024 isn’t a literal walk down the memory lane, but it has all the Rosie signifiers – some that had its debut exactly a decade ago. The very-oversized look, featuring a white top with a trail on the back, styled with matching white flares, is comfortingly familiar. The watercolour pattern come in always-chic picnic gingham and Frenchie stripes. A print of orchid pops in a couple of places, and the floral theme is translated into draped brooches that do the Carrie Bradshaw work on the masculine blazers and coats. Can’t forget to mention the summer-perfect, water print: its makes me think of Alex Katz, David Hockney and Tom Wesselmann, a couple of colour-obsessed, pop-art artists Rosie loves and in whose oeuvre finds constant inspiration. Assoulin, one of the most independent designers in NYC, in whose studio such talents as Christopher John Rogers have made their first steps and evolved, creates clothes for a loyal fan base of women, who appreciate uncompromising joy and boldness in their wardrobes. Here’s to another 10 years of Rosie’s brilliant creativity and fabulous fashion universe!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Performance-Wear. Diesel Resort 2024

June 7, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“We are continually evolving, it is about continuity,” said Glenn Martens regarding his process of reviving Diesel, and the democratic aspect of his resort 2024 offering. He added: “Perhaps more than anything I can say that what we did better this time was to take more carryover stories from the runway and industrialize them to create easier access price points for all of our stores and customers.” Another evolution, he said, was that his ambition to present Diesel collections as fluid, every-gender products on the shop floors has begun to manifest in certain flagship outlets – and that this lookbook was shot to reflect that. In other words, if February’s sultry, Durex-strewn Diesel show emphasized sex, then this follow-up collection was concerned with performance. The last-show iterations of Martens’ three Diesel pillars – denim, utility, and pop – were all harmniously diffused. Denim-wise, we saw the core material cut into jersey, leather, or bouclé panels on tough sportswear, trimmed with lace in easy-wearing little dresses, overlaid with oily or stonewashed color treatments, and used as a fabric for shoe uppers. The mainline collection’s intricate indigo dyed denim knits were reformulated in a fabrication designed to be color-fast as well as eye-catching. The designer emphasized that his foundational pivot to sustainability continues: “around 70% of all the denim here is produced through more sustainable processes,” he said. Elsewhere collegiate lettering on jerseys amusingly declared “Lies,” but this designer’s determination to green Diesel is no fib.

Women. Victoria Beckham Resort 2024

June 2, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Victoria Beckham – and her design team – seem to enjoy a newly found freedom in their creative process. The brand’s aesthetic can’t be as easily categorized as in the past: Beckham’s fashion is no longer about minimalism, that’s for sure. Rather, it’s about contemporary femininity that needs no labels. As she puts it: “There really is a strong reality in the garments. Everything looks really quite simple, but it’s all about the consideration, the execution, and the subtle details.” Somewhere along the line, her collections have assumed a non-uptight flow that strikes a good balance between usefulness and sophistication. Her confident assemblages of tailoring and mostly ankle-grazing fluid dresses have been garnering critical approval since she started showing in Paris a couple of seasons back. Still, it always takes a little while for a look to sink in, and then it’s another thing to follow up with tangible product that follows through on a good runway impression. Her spring pre-collection makes it clear that she’s got that covered as well. Asymmetry plays another role in her dressmaking. It’s not always easy to understand dresses that fly off madly in all sorts of directions, but here Beckham is using the possibilities of bias cutting, ruching, and collaging to great effect. Some of her eveningwear has the air of 1930s dance dresses, minus the vintage-y feel. There are day dresses that are somehow patchworked from pattern pieces that run in diagonals and seem to spiral around the body. You notice the dynamic lines because of the white piping edging each component. All that plays into hanger appeal, provoking the kind of curiosity liable to make a woman want to try something on rather than pass (as we do so often) because it looks too difficult. “I think it’s just about finding a point of difference,” Beckham observed. That doesn’t sound like much, but in a world overloaded with competing product from high street to haute level, such considerations count for a lot.

Ecclesiastical. Balenciaga Resort 2024

May 30, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Ever since Demna‘s beginnings in fashion, honest and straightforward observation of how people dress on the street and for various occupations has always been a dynamic behind his design. The scenario playing out in his new Balenciaga resort 2024 video is very much that way, except that this time the street is the Avenue Georges V. The time-lapse slice-of-life captures people busily going in and out of the Balenciaga maison at number 10, or passing by. Whether they’re denim-clad teens, a motorcycle delivery person, a bourgeois dog walker, a skateboarder, or the retinues of black-clad hoodie-up fashion people going about their business – this is how the whole world would look if everyone dressed in Balenciaga. Underlining the fact that Demna is steering the brand narrative back to Paris, and to the house, he punningly named the collection Capital B. His second take on the collection is by way of a lookbook, apparently shot in grand rooms that variously overlook the Place Vendome and the Arc de Triomphe. Here, his perma-silhouettes are clearly in view: the oversized suiting, enveloping trapezoid coats and puffed-up trenches, the hoodies, and the bug-eyed shades with almost everything. As a pre-collection it encompasses every Balenciaga category, womenswear and menswear, formal black tailoring to denim, motorcycle leathers and sweatpants. Interspersed are also pieces from the high-luxe “Garde-Robe” collection, which are an annual release, such as the silver-fringed embroidered dress at the end. And of course the Cristobal Balenciaga-inspired ecclesiastical gowns and chasuble coats: the ultimate highlights of this very well-executed collection, which is about good dose of drama (in the clothes, not in anything around it!).

Isola Bella. Louis Vuitton Resort 2024

May 25, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As a vivid nay-sayer of Nicolas Ghesquière‘s recent work at Louis Vuitton, I will admit it: the resort 2024 collection is BRILLIANT. It’s Ghesquière fashion – intelligent, quirky, high-and-low, time-proof, self-referential – that I love and truly missed for the last couple of years. His resort show yesterday (nearly) happened at the terraced gardens of Isola Bella, a tiny private island in Lake Maggiore that has belonged to Italy’s Borromeo clan for 500 years. Ferrying the likes of Catherine Deneuve, Oprah Winfrey, and Cate Blanchett, plus 1,000 or so other guests to the spectacular venue was quite the feat, but not even the powerhouse that is Louis Vuitton can change the weather. The rain was coming down in sheets, and plans for a sunset show and after-party en plein air had to be scrapped, though an earlier show was staged to create these images. The lake produces its own climate and Ghesquière was much inspired by the watery surroundings. “We started with the idea that the girls were coming from the water, like mermaids of the lake, and they’re transforming to something else,” he said. The explanation tied together a collection of many distinct proposals. Ghesquière tends to think freer and looser when he’s untethered from Paris, but this sci-fi fantasy had the dreaminess of a fairytale. It started with scuba gear featuring fin-like collars and water droplet embellishments. A pair of diving jackets were elaborately printed in a way that conjured both Hokusai waves and the creatures that might be living underneath them. He mixed neoprene tank suits with lavish courtly robes, and paired mermaid-scale sequin skirts with naval jackets. The baroque headgear was custom-made for the show by an atelier in Rome that works for the opera and movies. This was the French house’s first-ever show in Italy (a timely choice given its new CEO Pietro Beccari is Italian) and Ghesquière wanted to pay tribute to the country’s patrimony of craft. Then the mermaids found their sea legs. His everyday pieces included brushed cashmere sweaters in soft pastels that he described as Italian colors, button-downs and “jeans” in embroidered lace and sumptuous brocades, and classically cut coats that topped sequined floral dresses inspired by the island’s plantings.

“By the end the mermaid becomes a flower, but maybe not a flower that exists,” Ghesquière said. That notion produced a group of long dresses in more of those pastel shades that qualified as real news for the designer, who has typically shied away from gowns on the runway at LV. They were delicate and bold simultaneously, a mix of silk, georgette, organza, and lace from their softly draped bodices and pouf sleeves to their sculptural, swingy hems. Who needs mysterious lakes when you have the power of imagination? Who wants quiet luxury when you can have a couture-level cape with water droplet beading or a quilted damask jacket featuring wyvern, unicorn, and other legendary creatures? A captivating, transportive show.