Stella’s Market. Stella McCartney SS24

October 5, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

This was a very charming Stella McCartney fashion show. Along the Avenue de Saxe in the 7th arrondissement, the designer set up a temporary shop. She created Stella’s Sustainable Market: a classic Parisian marketplace lined with stalls featuring her favourite sustainable collaborators as well as nods to parents, Paul and Linda McCartney. Meanwhile, the collection – sweetly nostalgic, tinged with the 1970s, but also and referencing Stella’s 2000s fashion moments – featured 95 per cent conscious materials, the activist designer noted. “We’ve never gone that high before.” Ballooning blouses, mini dresses and bombers were made in NONA Source repurposed silk taffetas. Lead-free crystals sparkled on waistcoats, mini dresses were made of forest friendly viscose and crochet-and-mirror knits were spun from Kelsun™️ – a seaweed-based yarn. McCartney’s models walked the marketplace runway in a shared wardrobe that represented the family feeling she wanted to convey. “This was one of the first shows we’ve ever had with women and men. It was about showing that everyone can wear it, and how you say what you are through what you wear,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what gender you are. Our brand is open to everyone.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Weirdly Fascinating. Y/Project SS24

October 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Y/Project‘s Glenn Martens continues to push the limitations of fabrics in ways only he knows how. Like proposing swollen jeans that frothed in off-kilter formations, or controlling heaps off the fabric into severe hooded bomber jackets dyed in ecclesiastical purple. Warped and wonderfully weird, other standouts from the spring-summer 2024 collection included distorted negligee frocks worn with necklaces shaped like snakes (a Britney Spears moment), crumpled up crop tops, and a series of metal foil gowns that looked as if they were constructed from molten lava. This is a designer firmly in his own league.

High Relief. Valentino SS24

October 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2024, Pierpaolo Piccioli merges Valentino‘s couture roots with ready-to-wear sensibility, creating a touching ode to femininity. Against the backdrop of FKA Twigs performing with her dancers, his models walked in cut-out mini dresses that looked like the floral 3D relief you might find on an ornate plaster ceiling or a precious porcelain vase. He called the technique “high relief”, borrowing the term from sculpture and explaining that, “what you see as decoration becomes the construction itself”. Flying birds were appliquéd into tiny shift dresses, worn unlined with the flesh peeking through. The same high relief technique was applied to denim and printed on stretch knits. “It’s important for women to be free to express themselves through their body and not to be judged,” said the designer of his short, peekaboo styles. He’d been appalled by a spike in violence against women in Italy recently and wanted his show to be a manifesto for wearing what you want and expressing your self freely. He applied his couturier’s touch to the simple shapes, perfecting the cut of white shirts, immaculate kaftans, jeans, and mini-shifts. The clothes had an ease that belied the craft that was lavished on them.

Mothering. Balenciaga SS24

October 4, 2023October 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

With his spring-summer 2024 Balenciaga fashion show, Demna reminds once again that he’s a contemporary fashion visionary. “I have to be me. I can’t repress my creativity. I can’t castrate my vision. I just can’t do those things. It’s not me. So this collection is a celebration of everything that I love about fashion”, the designer said. Demna was coming off a year during which, he said, “I felt very alone.” In reaction, his latest show was a gathering of “the people who have meant most to me in my personal and professional life,” from his mother, who opened the show, to his husband Loïck Gomez, also known as BFRND, who wore the finale wedding dress, and mixed and scored the soundtrack featuring Isabelle Huppert reading out the instructions for tailoring a jacket. There were a whole lot of hot topics to unpack. When Demna talks of what he loves about fashion, he defines it in opposition to luxury. Some of his people were carrying faux passports with boarding cards to Geneva (where he lives) slotted into them – they were Balenciaga wallets, in fact. “Because it’s more about identity, to me,” he said. “I questioned a lot about that: How is fashion created? For me, I have to be honest: I don’t care much about luxury. I don’t want to give people a proposition to look like they’re rich or successful. Because ‘luxury’ is top down, and what is often seen as quite provocative about me is – I do bottom up.”

As for the clothes, it’s all about the quintessence of Demna’s trademark style: humungous tailoring, oversize hoodies and jeans, sinister leather coats and military camouflage were represented. So were plissé evening gowns, floral prints, bathrobes, motorcycle leathers. Vintage trenches and bombers were cobbled together with four sleeves apiece. Multiple evening gowns were made from multiple old evening gowns—black velvet, fuchsia satin, glittery gold. Demna’s jokey accessories were everywhere: Balenciaga sneakers grown even more absurdly vast than ever; supermarket grocery totes reproduced in leather; marabou-trimmed men’s kitten-heeled boudoir slippers, and hand-carried shoes converted into clutch bags. With all his favourite people on the runway – starting from Cathy Horyn and Renata Litvinova and ending on Elizabeth Douglas and Amanda Lepore – it seemed that Demna was truly proud of the collection. “What I showed today was probably my most personal and my most favorite collection, because it was about me; it was about my story.”

Slavic Chic. Magda Butrym SS24

October 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2024, Magda Butrym emphasizes her vocabulary of signature Slavic chic. Roses are the Polish label’s key signifier, and this season the designer offers a range of iterations of this motif. Silk-petal roses appear on shoes and arm-bracelets; floral shapes are draped around the bustiers, come hand-crotcheted or materialize in form of meticulous lace. The most intriguing version of Butrym’s favorite flowers was created in collaboration with Heven, Breana Box and Peter Dupont’s artisan brand. The gorgeous, blooming necklace made entirely from glass is fit for a goddess. Just like all the sheer, slinky dresses that look light as a feather.