Late Capitalism. Conner Ives SS24

September 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

We live in the times of late capitalism. It’s also how Conner Ives entitled his spring-summer 2024 collection, which starting point was a TikTok video he stumbled across a few months ago of a girl live-blogging her experience queuing for a fashion sample sale in New York as smoke from the Canadian wildfires bathed the city in an ominous orange glow. “As much as it felt like the end of days, there was also a dark humor to it,” Ives said at a preview. “It’s the beginning of the end of the world, and we’re waiting in line at a sample sale.” “Late Capitalism” – a collection that invitates to talk more openly about the economic realities of what keeps the fashion world moving – is “a subject that makes me uncomfortable, which made me feel like it was something worth talking about,” he said. Ives is one of a generation of designers for whom sustainability is something of a given, meaning he hasn’t telegraphed his eco-credentials all that loudly in the past (although with his signature approach of lending deadstock and upcycled vintage clothes a glamorous new life, you didn’t have to dig very deep to notice it). But he now feels a greater urgency to share the various methods by which he’s carved out his own, more responsible lane. “I think part of me didn’t want to get up on my soapbox, as I wasn’t sure if anyone really cared,” Ives said, noting that in his few years of doing production at scale, he’s repurposed nearly 15,000 T-shirts destined for scrap yards, while a new partnership with Depop will see him use the platform to source bulk raw material for production. And he’s open to talking about the fact that the system still isn’t perfect. Sure, he’s made a firm commitment to only staging a runway show once a year, but he still needs to produce lookbooks in between to allow him to sell year-round and keep his business afloat. “I’m very aware there’s an irony to the ‘Late Capitalism’ collection being an answer to getting more items into stores,” he acknowledged.

So, then, to the clothes. In his signature spirit of character-driven styling, Ives’s lookbook- photographed by Johnny Dufort, and starring the TikTok-favorite model of the moment Alex Consani – began with one of his “archetypes,” a T-shirt and skirt decorated with a swan motif as an ode to Natalie Portman’s doomed ballerina in Black Swan. Once again, there was plenty of fun to be had identifying the various figures he was paying homage to, from Charlotte York to Carmela Soprano. Ives also continued his journey of expanding out from the spliced T-shirt dresses that made his name as a fashion editor favorite, continuing to develop his tailoring and elevate his eveningwear offering. Highlights included a series of T-shirt dresses with 1930s-inspired trumpet skirts made of recycled jersey, a sheer bias-cut dress cut from baseball jersey material, and a swishy black halter gown with a mother-of-pearl shell as a belt buckle. But perhaps the most striking looks came at the end, in the form of a dazzlingly intricate dress strung together from 9,000 soda can tabs, and a slip made from cowrie shells strung together in a bias lattice. Cowrie shells, being one of the earliest forms of currency in human history as Ives pointed out, is another nod to the collection’s meditations on commerce.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!

In Search For Clarity. Burberry SS24

September 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Daniel Lee‘s debut collection at Burberry signaled that he isn’t planning to reinvent the wheel at the brand. His sophomore collection, presented yesterday under the tent at London’s Highbury Fields, confirmed the assumptions about the designer’s direction for the house: clothes and accessories interweaved with Britishness. But is it enough to truly revive the brand? Unfortunately, the spring-summer 2024 failed to deliver a cohesive “look”. The knee-length, low-belted silhouettes with symmetric lapels and minimal epaulettes applied across womenswear and menswear could easily be Stella McCartney. Instead of last season’s blanket coats, Lee presented his take on the trench coat. The boxy shape looked neat and crisp, but it didn’t make my heart beat faster. Lee had moments dedicated to English summer flowers and fruit: cascading swarms of blue strawberries, blown-up meadow-flower prints. The clumsy-looking knitted dresses didn’t do it for me. While Burberry’s new visual communication thrives and the brand drastically increases prices on its goods (have you seen the knitted duck cap for 3000 euros?), Lee’s work – the heart of reinvention – needs more clarity.

Debo Of Devonshire. Erdem SS24

September 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The Erdem spring-summer 2024 show at the British Museum was one of the best in seasons coming from the designer. The collection was dedicated to the late Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah “Debo” Cavendish, a very stylish dame. A friend of the family, Erdem Moralioglu had been given access to the archives of Chatsworth House – the family seat in Derbyshire – and trusted with the task of giving Debo’s antique furnishing textiles new life in the form of clothes. “When curtains came down in Chatsworth, they were often turned into upholstery. She believed in the continuity of using them,” he explained. And so, Moralioglu presented his very extra take on upcycling. The show opened with a series of coats created from Debo’s (actual) old textiles and spliced – via a collaboration with Barbour – with the waxed cotton jackets she wore in the park at Chatsworth. “I loved taking the idea of the 1940s’s opera coat and these big couture volumes but making a piece of outerwear. She loved quilted skirts, and we pieced them together using antique fabrics from Chatsworth,” Moralioglu explained. The look had all the soulfulness of lived-in clothes, invigorated by wild cutting as if he’d audaciously hacked through the antique cloth to release all its history. It transpired in the fabrics that followed, each imbued with the feeling of Chatsworth’s interiors and one more intricately woven than the other.

The youngest of the five Mitford sisters, Debo wasn’t just the queen of the social scene in the 1930s but an accomplished writer who cared deeply about the documentation and preservation of Chatsworth House and all its splendours. On the show’s soundtrack, she could be heard explaining how terribly privileged she knew she was to live there. Her soundbites were mixed with fragments of Always on My Mind. A layered character, Debo was also a passionate Elvis Presley fan and collector of memorabilia. “The more I found out about her, the more I fell in love with her,” Moralioglu said after the show, and you could see why. For all its historical significance and mind-blowing sense of resourcefulness, there was a lot of humour to the Erdem collection as well. Debo’s love of Presley was interpreted in starburst embroideries and garments with whispers of rhinestone cowboys, and her passion for chicken breeding was celebrated in plumage-like textures and in the magnified bows of kitten heels that made the models walk with the bobbing of a feathered-footed chicken. It was an inspired, emotional and quite spectacular show, which only begged one question: How will Moralioglu manufacture a collection created from antique textiles? “We need to figure it out! No, there’s a plan… I think,” he smiled. “I hope.”

Ceremonies & Roses. Simone Rocha SS24

September 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Simone Rocha staged her spring-summer 2024 show in the rehearsal space at the English National Ballet. “I love the rise and fall of doing a show,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a big spectacle, sometimes it really brings people in.” By shows, she also had wedding ceremonies on her mind. The cake-inspired tiers of appliqué on white tulle dresses and the sound of silver “wedding” bells tinkling on slippers, sleeves and bags. “It’s almost fragmented,” the designer said of Frederic Sanchez’s music for the show. “It’s that disturbed feeling, all the emotions of a rehearsal… the nerves!” Despite the sense of tension Rocha set out to create, there’s little chance of a bride wearing one of these dresses getting cold feet the night before. The show’s highlight: instead of a bride holding a bouquet, fresh roses were bunched between layers of sheer tulle, and fabric versions were manipulated into dresses and jackets. Models carried single stems fashioned from cotton or pearls, and bare legs were decorated with red rose tattoos. As a motif, it was equal parts enchanting and fragrant.

Hard Folk. Chopova Lowena SS24

September 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Chopova Lowena, a relatively young brand, is stomping its way through a period of economic gloom, in a country severely hamstrung by the after-effects of Brexit and the pandemic, with good humor, common sense, and clever ideas. Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena’s weakness for folkloric whimsy with a streetwise swagger speaks for itself and keeps on enchanting the clients. Extra spice came courtesy of the casting, which took in friends, colleagues, acquaintances, plus mothers and brothers and boyfriends, resulting in a compelling line-up of characters you simply couldn’t take your eyes off. For their spring-summer 2024, the designers had chosen the skatepark as an homage to the “skater boy you love” (that’s Bulgaria-born, New Jersey-raised Chopova) “or the boy you want to be” (Somerset-raised tomboy Lowena-Irons). Tony Hawk made his presence felt in plaid pajama pants, graphic zip-up hoodies, board shorts and studded Ugg boots, part of a collaboration with the brand. The rest referenced the ancient Flora Day festival, held every May in the village of Helston in Cornwall, on England’s wild south-west coast. Comprising numerous processions and dances, including mermaids and maidens, angels and devils, it manifested in hand-embroidered broderie anglaise dresses, thick leather belts and a pair of knickers adorned with hundreds of beads and charms, and a particularly fabulous jacket made of white crispy ribbons like those you’d see on draped across a wedding car.