Strangeness In The Mundane. Jw Anderson SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Finally, a collection this season that makes the viewer truly wonder. Nobody transforms the mundane into extraordinary like Jonathan Anderson. Plasticine – that’s what the blue hoodie and white shorts were molded from at the beginning of the JW Anderson spring-summer 2024 fashion show in London. Anderson discovered that Plasticine is still being manufactured in Northern Ireland, the place of his birth, plus it makes adults smile as much now as back in their childhoods. That was an emblematic starter for a collection that had Anderson’s collection circling back to the youth-based energy of his brand. “It was kind of re-going back to find a new path,” he said. In the summer he “saw all these girls and boys hanging out wearing biker jackets and cargos.” Street observation – seeing the generic clothes young people really wear, but with a different attitude in each generation – put him in the mood to think about “what happens when you focus on reduction. It wasn’t about a lot of tricks. Kind of a cleanser.” Adding glamour to the MA-1 archetype by inflating it as a cocoon and having feathers explode from the seams was another cheerful moment, equally beautiful. And putting something that might have been a Hula-Hoop up the skirt of a knitted dress. Playfulness balanced with practicality might be a way to sum it up. Love!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Behind The Scenes. Molly Goddard SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

This season, Molly Goddard played with the notion of a “behind the scenes” moment: what’s happening behind the surface, or closed doors or… the clothes. The spring-summer 2024 show took place at Christie’s auction house on King Street, the other occasions upon which the designer would tend to visit were during the set up of displays. She elaborated: “When there are these masterpieces just lying on the floor: it’s kind of amazing to see and very exciting, which I guess in some way is connected to the collection.” Goddard fashioned a fair few masterpieces of her own in a lineup that focused on nudging the mechanics of garments to the surface, turning them inside out in order to create a patina of production. She said she’d done her research in the National Theatre Costume Hire, examining the stitched clockwork of garments ranging in style from Regency to contemporary. Long skirts were shirred at the hip to create drape down to edged froths of pale ruffled petticoat. The trademark tulle skirts were teamed with loosely corseted tops whose sheerness exposed the geography of boning and corsetry that defined their gentle geography. A dusty pink woolen cardigan was edged with a two-inch strip of satin, like some old granny blanket left bundled in the cupboard of a spare room. Washed out red rose prints used on more skirts and knitted into another cardigan – magenta paneled at the shoulder – added to the sense of comfortable, domestic nostalgia. A precise excavation of the deeply familiar but also overlooked, this was a quietly masterful collection. Said Goddard: “What I enjoy most is when I get really stuck in to how to make clothes; the techniques and the fabrics and the fit.” That pleasure in Goddard’s process was evident in its result.

Fetishization of Pain. Mowalola SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Mowalola Ogunlesi delivered a sharp start of London Fashion Week. Mowalola, the brand, is fast, furious, and at times obscene, but in a creatively vital way. Backstage of her spring-summer 2024 show, the designer, said the collection had been sparked by her first-ever viewing of David Cronenberg’s Crash. “I was really excited by the fetishization of pain through crashing,” she said. It prompted her to imagine “a whole universe that resides on the street,” filtered through a prism of ecstatic jeopardy. But Mowalola doesn’t stick to one reference. Masturbating anime girl prints; off-the-shoulder bombers with faux Highway Patrol patches; thigh-highs and micro skirts inspired by street walkers. A lot of stuff that Ogulensi’s customers will love. All that, like the excellent dirty denims, seemed to emanate a conceptual solar system adjacent to some of Glenn Martens’s work at Diesel. The pants that flashed cracks at the back and crotch hairlines were maybe subject to the influence of Alexander McQueen’s gravity. This was good company to keep: however the gartered, bisected pants and skirts, now a Mowalola signature, were all Ogunlesi’s own. The flags-of-the world theme was another highlight. This also ran into a poignant EU skirt meets Union Jack cap look. The extreme contrast of volumes in some sportswear looks made the generic appear particular.

Time For Fun. Batsheva SS24

September 15, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Batsheva Hay is in her daring, experimental era: for the past few seasons she has been pushing against the limits that delineate what her brand can be. “I have no classical fashion background, so I learned with cut-and-sew garments, and it was all handed off,” she explained. “I used to feel like I couldn’t work with the garments. I had to hand things over, then pick them up, and it was very nice for my lifestyle. Then I’d go home and nurse my baby and then hand her off, pick the clothes up, pick out the buttons or whatever.” She laughed at the familiar juggling of so many women who go home at the end of a workday for a different kind of work. “But now I find the really fun part is tearing things, shredding things, adding little bustles, pinning things onto things. And I do think that’s an important part of what distinguishes my brand from other brands; that there’s a little bit of naivete in it. It’s not quite feral, but just the amateurness of it all.” For sping-summer 2024, Batsheva went The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel with all the 1950s volumes and colours, but also in the sense of humor. These “grotesque experiments,” as Hay calls them, involved her pinning a surplus of cotton placemats and oven mitts that she had lying around. “I just started safety-pinning them on my body, and I thought, Oh, it’s so sexy,” While the oven-mitt dress feels very much like oven mitts that have been safety-pinned together when you’re just “being goofy,” the experimentation did take her to some groovy places. Like the dress made from delicately embroidered cotton placemats, which has a sort of romantic quality to it, and the top made from floral-print cotton placemats, which Hay draped over a white cotton “cheerleader full-circle skirt” with turquoise godets further propped up by a hoop skirt underneath. If it all sounds a little nutty, it is, but it also feels wearable and oddly accessible. Hay expanded, elongated, or otherwise stuffed some of her go-to silhouettes, like the turquoise dress modeled by Amy Fine Collins, which is one of her bestsellers, and the high-waist, pleated skirt in turquoise with embroidered kissy prints, which she makes every season in different fabrications. The designer was also having fun at her presentation inside the BondST restaurant at Hudson Yards, where models holding little number signs walked around guests, midcentury couture show style, while Hay narrated the looks and then opened the floor for questions and comments from the audience.

Hustling. Luar SS24

September 15, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For a couple of seasons now, Luar is the finale New York Fashion Week show. It’s a good ending, one that leaves an impression of hope for the city’s contemporary fashion. This was Raul Lopez’s most streamlined and mature collection to date. The butter yellow boxy jacket that opened the show had rows of fully functional rouleau buttons that wrapped around the arms and could be unbuttoned to form a short sleeve jacket. It was worn with a matching pair of shorts that could be unbuttoned to become a panty, and white sheer hose – a mainstay of a certain church look for Caribbean women – and golden sandals. This opening look conveyed the rhythm of this collection, which was mostly about experiments with tailoring . A series of long tailored jackets with wide peak lapels appeared to be worn over draped skirts in the same fabric but were in fact all one piece – a fact that was only obvious as the models walked away and you noticed an elaborately draped back. It hinted at the tension Lopez was exploring – the wanting to move forward but getting pulled back by circumstances or by human temptation. Further pushing this point were the button-down shirts worn underneath the suit, in classic banker stripes, which featured an extra long collar that stood out against the neck – mirroring the motion of actually being pulled back by the neck. Other standouts included the separates made from “crackle vinyl,” meant to mimic the cement floors that are typical in the houses in the Dominican Republic neighborhood where Luar had its show. It looked particularly glamorous on a shirt with that same rouleau button detail along the sleeve and the bodice, tucked into a high-waist mermaid skirt in a shade of warm cement gray, and a little subversive on a shirt in a cooler shade of gray tucked into a pleated skort and worn with a long white tie. “I think this season I was more refined with the hand embroideries, the fabrics, the suiting, the crepes… I just feel like I’m evolving into my true self,” Lopez said. “This marks the 10th year that I do an actual runway show, and I was thinking how all this hustling and bustling really paid off, because it’s such a beautiful thing to be a New Yorker and be recognized in the city. And it kind of sets the tone of having to show out when I do a show.” He paused for a second, “but who knows what next season will bring? Maybe I’ll go back to being crazy.”