Functional Styling. Victoria Beckham AW22

March 6, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

As a designer-and-style-icon package solution, Victoria Beckham and her brand embody a decidedly contemporary aspect of consumer fashion: styling. Her design propositions don’t simply make their case on a runway, but when she is actually photographed by the paparazzi wearing them herself, showcasing how she would personally style her collection. It’s a way of proposing product entirely in tune with a social media age focused on the dress sense of the individual. To Beckham, playing with the functions of clothes is second nature, and she can’t resist getting in there, wrapping and tying and layering whatever look is standing in front of her. She demonstrated that on house models in her Paris showroom (a rather strange decision – Beckham’s brand feels 100% London, while in Paris it gets lost in the crowd) for her new collection, which exemplified the idea of clothes made to be styled. While it had all the beautifully cut coats and blouses, the collection’s cleverness was to be found in garments purpose-made for layering or wrapping. In the case of a finely knitted onesie, for instance, Beckham said she would never wear it on its own. “I would wear it with a dress over the top. I would wear it with a skirt over the top,” she explained. “We’ve been doing polo-neck bodies for a while, and they’re great layering pieces. They really can finish off an outfit and make it very considered. With this knitted one, you’d absolutely put a dress over the top.” Body-conscious and sensual, it created a silhouette at once sexy and fully covered from head to toe, an idea reflected in sequined dresses layered with skin-tight transparent organza dresses on top for a filtrage effect that also helped to define the shape Beckham wanted to achieve. “I always love sequins, but it’s about finding a new, fresh way of doing them by either putting the organza or knitwear over the top. It’s a refined superhero sequin,” she said. The season’s biggest addition is a new bag line. “We had bags before, but that came from working on the catwalk collection and wanting to finish off a silhouette. This time we’re much more strategic about it, making sure that everything is functional and every detail is taken care of,” the designer summed up. Her proposal ranged from bucket bags to disc-shaped pouches and more classic handbags, some emblazoned with the VB monogram she launched as part of her last pre-collection. A clutch bag was adorned with the golden chain of a men’s wristwatch as a nod to a personal memory. “When I got my OBE, my husband bought me a watch, and I love masculine watches, and I loved the bracelet detail,” she said, echoing the idea of injecting a product’s design with the styling properties of accessories.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Pop It Up. Loewe AW22

March 6, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jonathan Anderson is in his surrealist element, and his work has never felt so liberated and full of expression as now. The autumn-winter 2022 collection for Loewe, which has caused a stir on social media, is an intriguing and confident take on all things erotic and kinky, conveyed through impeccable and innovative craftsmanship. But also, in times when reality becomes outrageous and nonsensical, it’s only logical that fashion should start to reflect illogicality. Anderson’s new season clothes included the following: a mini trapeze dress with a car trapped in the hem; tube dresses with high-heel pumps stuffed down them; rough-cut shearling pervily butting against latex; shoes entirely sunk in some sort of drawstring-bag galoshes; and lots of balloons: red ones squeezed between shoe straps and oozing from bandage-dress drapery; brown and beige ones blown up as bras, the knots bobbling along as obscene parodies of nipples. “A balloon creates tension,” Anderson observed. “It will pop. It won’t last forever.”

Surrealism – the art movement that turned pre–WW II mass psychological tension into art in the late 1930s – has never been more relevant. But Anderson was already going surreal-ward last season – reveling in the freedom of being unshackled from fashion rules, doing things instinctively, without reason. It parallels a time when it was only human to respond dementedly to the trampling of order all around us. But there’s plenty of method in Anderson’s madness. His opening series of short leather, cap-sleeve dresses, the skirts molded to seem as if swishing in the wind, had a lot of Réne Magritte about them. The polish and luxurious colors also had a lot to say about Loewe’s fundamental materials and skills as a leather-based house. Anderson mentioned that he’d also been looking at feminist art. There were references to the surrealist Meret Oppenheim (all the fluffy fur) and Lynda Benglis, who uses poured latex (the rubber tanks and mini-dresses), that art-knowledgeable people would clock as footnotes. Still, the biggest art-Anderson-Loewe connection was set out before the audience in the center of the show: a series of squashes by Anthea Hamilton. The British sculptor and Anderson have already got together on Hamilton’s art performances at the Tate. The squashes, it turns out, were constructed for her in leather by craftspeople at Loewe. There’s clever marketing in all of these interconnections, these compliments to the intelligence of avant-garde, art-appreciating Loewe women of the world. They buy fashion for such things as gallery openings and art fairs: Loewe, in all its wild eccentricities, is a uniform for them.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Reassuring Stability. Isabel Marant AW22

March 6, 2022March 6, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Some things just don’t change. Like Isabel Marant collections. They always give… Isabel Marant. And that’s not a bad thing – in our turbulent and ever-changing world, at least she offers us some reassuring stability. “For me, this season was about this ballad of a girl, she’s really going to the essentials; she wears a knitted dress with a huge coat over it. I wanted to do something very evident and very cozy, and easy to wear, and being naively sexy. She’s very discreet and at the same time very powerful,” said the eternal Parisian woman. There were indeed little sweater dresses worn under big coats, accompanied by the over-the-knee boots that have become one of the season’s key trends. Another combination that in the before times of the pre-pandemic might’ve seemed surprising, but now looks like the new normal: the glam sport of a sexy evening top (here in stretch panné velvet) and shell pants. Beyond the boots and oversize outerwear, this show told us definitely that cargo pants will be big next autumn, and that pants in general are going to be lower-slung and longer of leg, likely with a little kick flare. If this designer has anything to do with it, we’ll all be in baggy jeans, too. Rianne Van Rompaey closed the show in a faded black pair with drop pockets and, as promised, a super-relaxed slouch.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Extraterrestrial Angels. Rick Owens AW22

March 5, 2022March 5, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The fog machines at Rick Owens were pumping the scent of his new collaboration with Aesop into his show space at the Palais de Tokyo. Models also carried thuribles, modern mechanized versions of the censers that priests use to dispense incense in church. Owens was a Catholic school boy. In a pre-show interview, he talked about his upbringing: “thinking and talking about morality in school all day and studying Cecil B. DeMille’s 1930s Art Deco black-and-white interpretation of the bible,” by night. “That’s what formed me,” he said with a laugh. “I’m so transparent.” For autumn-winter 2022, Owens was after something a bit more solemn following his January men’s show, whose lamp helmets and zip-all-the-way-to-the-hairline hoods look aggressive a month-and-a-half later amidst the onset of war. He quoted from his press release: “During times of heartbreak, beauty can be one of the ways to maintain faith.” This was a beauty of a Rick Owens collection, starting with a full complement of evening dresses, including a few Oscars red carpet contenders in “dusty sequins,” draped with evocative asymmetry from the shoulders and featuring collapsing volumes at the back or around the hips. Cropped and shrunken jackets and lean and languid bias-cut skirts caught a bit of the Old Hollywood glamour, but these weren’t in Cecil B. DeMille’s black-and-white. Owens combined peach and apricot, and a whole spectrum of oranges. The yellow and aqua blue pairings inevitably conjured visions of the Ukrainian flag. In a season of strong outerwear, few pieces can rival Owens’s for audacity. There were puffer jackets whose sleeves extended to the ground, duvet jackets that curled around the torso like nautilus shells, and “Theda Bara” parkas with goat fur trim that look like commercial hits in the making. “I’ve been hearing people being apologetic for presenting fashion right now,” Owens said. “We’re an industry that has to support a lot of people, there’s no reason to make an excuse for that. We are people who express the best that aesthetics has to offer. And that’s of great social and cultural value.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Rewilding. Chloé AW22

March 5, 2022March 5, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Sustainability is also priority for Gabriela Hearst, whether it’s her New York-based brand or Chloé – the Parisian house. “We think about the climate crisis, we’re able to see the climate crisis,” Hearst declared. “But now it’s time to start visualizing climate success. And there are many ways of doing it. Rewilding is one of them.” More than any other high-fashion designer, except for Stella McCartney, Hearst invites discussion, inspection, even, of how she sources her materials. Which meant that a fundamental divergence between the positions of these two climate-activist fashion designers opened up at the beginning of the show. Here for autumn-winter 2022 there was leather. A lot of it. Not “vegan leather” or any of its fruit or mushroom substitutes, or its fossil fuel-derived polyester lookalikes, but actual glossy leather-leather. Made from the hides of cattle. “For me, leather is a by-product of the meat industry,” Hearst said in a preview. “So, as long as you know where it’s coming from, and you have traceability and it’s done in a proper way, you’re using waste.” Her leather comes from Italian suppliers, whose tanning processes are compliant with European environmental standards. Over to how the overture to the collection looked: strict, minimal, black, brown and yellowy-tan leather pieces, ranging from coats to shirts to narrow jeans – with an of-the-moment white tank tee – and a belted black dress with balloon sleeves. The show hewed between boy-tailored pant suits, fit-and-flare dresses, and Hearst’s characteristic affinity for ponchos and knitwear—and for searching out links with socially-responsible textile projects. The latest is her commissioning of the African-American Gee’s Bend women quilters of Alabama. The storied artist community used Chloé deadstock scraps to fashion blankets and the gilet layered over a coat worn as the finale by Amber Valletta. On the runway, Hearst wanted to materialize the hope that damage can be reversed. She did it with recycled cashmere knitted sweaters and skirts. On the front were instarsia images of melted glaciers, arid and burning landscapes. On the reverse: pictures of green mountain ranges, forests and polar bears. The only thing that misses the mark is the lack of lightness. Chloé is a French brand that is all about the flou – and Hearst, it seems, just doesn’t want go that direction. Beneath all the leathers, heavy blankets and chunky trekking boots, you wish you could see more of the feminine aspect of the label. Maybe it’s worth investigating that field next season?