I Wish You Roses. Magda Butrym Pre-Fall 2023

January 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Magda Butrym‘s pre-fall 2023 collection launched at the time Kali Uchis released her new, soothing single, I Wish You Roses. “I was a rose in the garden of weeds, my petals are soft and silky as my sheets, so do not be afraid to get pricked by the thorns“. Sometimes, a feeling is captured simultaneously by both, music and fashion. The Polish designer, who dresses Hollywood’s leading women, from Natalie Portman to Margot Robbie, knows how to serve a collection that’s feminine, romantic, yet absolutely badass and empowering. The pre-fall offering sees model Erin Wasson wearing the most sexy red dress of the season, literally blooming with hand-draped roses. There’s a column-dress moment in silver lamé; a summer-perfect sun-dress made entirely from crotchet; a hooded black gown giving total red carpet glam. The floral print, so signature for the brand, goes through a Kar Wai Wong’s In The Mood For Love lens this season. The eveningwear is hot, and Butrym keeps on evolving other parts of the wardrobe as well. The red blazer with broad, 1980s shoulders is as convincing and bold as the boxy leather coat. The best-selling heels with pinned flowers now come with the chicest pearls attached. “I wish you roses, yeah, roses, roses…“

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Le Sentiment. Officine Générale AW23

January 22, 2023January 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

I gasped a couple of times while browsing the Officine Générale autumn-winter 2023 collection. Those were gasps of utmost awe with Pierre Mahéo‘s take on the eternal French style, which is a combination of restrained elegance and exploration of the idea of uniform. For this designer, consistency of dress is a form of elegance that he not only studies but has practiced for decades. He’s always admired people who, by choice, design, default, or whatever, stay true to their own style. He, too, continues to wear, and cherish, a timeworn pea coat. “It’s about a sentimental relationship to clothing,” the designer offered backstage before the show, recounting how last autumn, when his team was brainstorming this collection, he realized he wanted to just focus on the two colors he’s been wearing himself for the past 30 years or so. “I don’t want to change things, I want to perfect them,” he said. Monochro-Mania therefore took shape as an ode to blue and grey, the two elemental colors of every Parisian wardrobe. For Mahéo, it was an essential exercise in exploring why he does what he does: why those colors, why he reinterprets them season after season, why continuity makes him happy despite the fashion pendulum’s inevitable swings. And, especially, expressing many things with a spare vocabulary, “in the same way that Serge Gainsbourg famously stuck to five pieces of clothing.” For the new season, the Officine Générale uniform might be a simple-looking T-shirt in wool jersey, layered over another and paired with matte wool trousers that are slightly more ample than they were last season. Here and there, Mahéo slipped in some iconic references, variously a military-inspired jacket that nods to the olive one worn by Al Pacino in Taxi Driver; a steel gray velvet jacket – perhaps worn with a touch of pink – that plays on Wes Anderson’s register; or a style of cape long favored by Prince. Here and there, a swirled print cropped up on a shirt and trouser, or a blue silk flower on a shirt (obsessed!). On the runway, the clothes gave an overall impression of reassuringly chic Rive Gauche style. Love it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Country Mod. Kenzo AW23

January 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s a year since Nigo‘s debut collection for Kenzo. In his third season for the brand, the designer began to bring himself more forcefully into the picture, which doesn’t mean there was no sight of Kenzo Takada’s spirit. Nigo went for a Beatles-inspired wake, developing a collection that was deeply rooted in mod culture but which also enveloped Kenzo’s and his own through that deeply impressive Japanese capacity to brilliantly editorialize clothes. English country couture and its mod unravelling played against Japanese tailoring, kimono inspired, above hakama-style traditional dress trousers. There was, Nigo conceded happily in a preview, a strong dose of post-Pirates Vivienne Westwood in the underlying instinct to remix through disruption. The stitched patterns were sourced, Nigo said through his translator, from the etching used on sashiko jackets traditionally used to practice Kendo. But it was all wrapped up with other factors; US workwear, UK punk, post-military (in an incredible khaki goldfish-embroidered kimono bomber look), contemporary workwear and more. The only criticism was that Nigo’s mastery of the feminine aspect seemed unsure: it was either menswear-sourced templates or frills and shirring: reductive.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Renewal & Change. Dior AW23

January 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The autumn-winter 2023 collection is Kim Jones‘ best line-up for Dior Men, hands down. It felt like an eureka moment, a direction for the designer to take with the brand. The new season sees a change of spirit and style, with Jones presenting an absolute understanding of sophisticated menswear that can be both unexpected and easy, refined and relevant. Inspiration-wise, the British designer returned to his extensive collection of rare books once again. He brought in Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie to recite The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s epically difficult, melancholic poem written in the aftermath of World War I. Jones owns six copies of this work of English literature which is considered to be pivotal to the modernism of exactly a century ago; so there were the faces of Pattinson and Christie, filmed by Baillie Walsh, and blown up on massive screens as the models walked past. All that’s just to fill in the background. What Jones took from the meaning of this most British of works was to do with its themes of time passing, death and renewal. “For me, I read it as about renewal and change; times changing,” he said before the show. “So it begins with Christian Dior dying, and then Yves Saint Laurent coming in and suddenly doing new things. And there’s a lot of me in it.” To parse the fashion stanzas: there were pale, neutral colors, a looseness and fluidity, layerings of transparent trails streaming from the backs of trousers. There was a moment for jackets and sweaters embroidered with tiny chains of abstracted lily of the valley, the early spring flower-favorite of Christian Dior. Then, as Christie and Pattinson spoke Eliot’s passages on death by drowning, there were conceptual life jackets with tonally matched buoyancy pads, riffs on seafarer’s Aran knits, voluminous A-line storm coats, takes on yellow seafaring oilskin raincoats, and sou’westers. Over the long run, Jones has been a pioneer in bringing street references into high fashion, and then insisting on applying Christian Dior’s women’s templates to menswear. As times move on, it’s a measure of Jones’s influence that the skirts – and shorts so wide that they look like skirts – in this show now pass as quite normal. He’s working in 2023, not 1923, like T.S. Eliot. English academics the world over might be aghast at Eliot’s poetry being used in a fashion show, but the two Britishers at least have this in common: being out to change the discipline they work in, mediating between history and the future.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Shades of Paris. Ami AW23

January 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Ami is a brand that orbits around the idea of Paris. Parisian chic, Parisian grayness, Parisian je ne sais quoi. Sometimes, it’s just too much Paris. Last season, the brand shut down Sacré-Coeur and coaxed French actor Audrey Tautou out of semi-retirement to open the show. After the brand’s ridiculous appearance in an episode of the third season of Netflix’s series Emily in Paris, in which the titular marketing whiz orchestrates a campaign featuring Ami-logo balloons, show attendees might have expected to have Paris’s perkiest American envoy Emily Cooper leading the latest line-up. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and Alexandre Mattiussi went back to basics. “I’ve already done a lot about that Parisian postcard vibe,” he said. “After 12 years, this is what we’ve been known for, this Parisian chic, easygoing energy. But I felt with this collection it has to be something else.” Something else turned out to be an Opéra Bastille location and a pared-back collection that focused on semaphoring languid ease. The label shelved the bright colors in favour of a muted palette of vanilla, butter, and gray. Great emphasis was put on fluid silhouettes – generous overcoats cut with a certain amount of slouch, pleated wide-leg trousers, flat shoes worn with nubbly cappuccino-hued socks – and comfortable fabrics. As Charlotte Rampling closed the show, radiant in a navy-blue pant suit, one sensed a vibe shift coming from a brand that at one point became too all-over-the-place.