style

Glamour-To-Wear. Area AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Area’s Piotrek Panszczyk and Beckett Fogg continue to push the envelope with their made-to-wear glamour. Since launching the brand in 2013, the designers have done so much introspection and recalibration that it’s hard to know if it’s the go-to brand for haute space bitches, haunting Dadaist ghouls, pop star glamazons, or former first ladies. Ask Panszczyk and he’ll answer that the label has always been for everyone but the clothes didn’t always show it, seasonally skewing in favor of one audience while cutting out the rest. Panszczyk and Fogg took 2020 to recenter themselves and their brand, choosing to show in season and to make salability and creativity equal parts of their process. Not either/or but both. As Panszczyk explained over a Zoom call, their shoppers have just as much desire for a couture-grade crystal pantie as they do a pair of crystal-studded jeans. To meet their needs, Area presented its own kind of solution dressing this season, injecting glamour into normcore and normalcy into high-gloss glamorama. Jeans enter the picture in a medium-wash straight-leg style adorned with crystals and paired with a bitchy little bustier. Tweed suiting is cropped and shrunken, with rhinestone fringe falling from hems. A classic LBD comes in vinyl, and the brand’s famous pale pink lamé returns in the form of iridescent minidresses, corsets, and skirts. Knitwear is growing too, with pink and lime pieces dotted with tiny crystal bows. This new Area wardrobe captures the vixenish nature of the label without compromising on wearability; exactly the branding exercise a company needs to push it from emerging to established. But Panszczyk and Fogg are smart to not let their good business sense totally overshadow the weirdness that makes Area special. During the pandemic they connected with Chinese designer Dingyun Zhang, whose enormous puffer jackets have also caught the eye of Kanye West and his Yeezy team. After a couple DMs, the trio decided to collaborate, cropping Zhang’s puffers into cloudlike vests, bralettes, and skirts, and then tamping them down with Area’s crystal harnesses. The results are delightfully kooky, heavenly, and sensual all at once. Area’s year of questioning has yielded some good answers.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Berlin: Voo Store

| Design & Culture by Ed

It’s not the first time Voo Store appears on the blog, but it’s truly worth a second mention. The place has changed a lot during the pandemic, and a new energy is present across the racks of Prada corduroy coats and GmbH sexy leathers, and displays filled with Isa Boulder’s knitted bodywear and Ormaie perfumes. Voo Store is a culturally empowered, creatively driven concept space located in the heart of Berlin’s Kreuzberg, occupying a charming 300 square meter courtyard space on the ground floor of a former locksmiths. The street on which the store sits continues to attribute itself to its unique and progressive approach to contemporary fashion. Translating a personal vision of Berlin through a careful selection of local and international designers and products, Voo Store is an exploration in modern design, visual culture and the future of luxury retail. The store’s seasonal presentations are supplemented by a backbone of carryover favourites and classics, with its in-house café, Toki, further complimenting Voo’s retail experience serving a variety of specialty coffee, as well as a selection of fresh-baked goods. Markedly unique, Voo Store continues to set itself apart as a concept by ensuring its selection of innovative fashion, books, magazines and art become possessions for life and serve more the longevity within design as opposed to short-lived trends.

Oranienstraße 24 / Berlin

Photos by Edward Kanarecki.

Scale Up. Jordan Dalah SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Jordan Dalah is one of Australia’s most intriguing, emerging fashion talents. When you see Dalah’s cocooning garments that extend and distort the potential of the human silhouette, there’s really no wonder why he opened this season’s Australia Fashion Week in Sydney – his works are stunning. The designer has been toying with gigantic, exaggerated shapes and cloudy silhouettes for quite some time now, and his padding and puffing couldn’t feel more right for now, least of all because his clothes are the kind that make you want to drift into a daytime nap just wearing them. But Jordan’s Elizabethan volumes as well carry a strong sense of theatre and performance. As Dalah explained to the press, for spring-summer 2022 season he spent the months leading up to his runway debut “finding the strongest silhouettes I could make – and then really knocking them out.” His fluted shapes and high, gathered shoulders are positively supersized, cloaking models in quirky stripes, graphic patterns, and soft rose-colored silks. That’s where the surprise element comes in: underneath some of Dalah’s more dramatic shapes are removable tubular bustles that look something like a pool floatie. When the dresses are deflated, so to speak, they lose their gargantuan proportions and reveal expertly done sensual bias draping. Other pieces are cut slim from the start, like a ’40s-ish black button-up midi-dress and an evocative light blue mini with a pierrot collar and bell cuffs. A leather jacket with signature exaggerated sleeves has more mass appeal – ditto the puffed sandals made in collaboration with Actually Existing and the puffed robes made with Common Hours. Dalah has proven he has the mettle to think big and practically.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Julie Kegels’ Supper Club

| Design & Culture by Ed

“I will always be me,” Belgian fashion designer Julie Kegels told 1 Granary. Ever since primary school, she dreamt of joining the fashion department at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp – the city where she was born and raised. The stars aligned, and we’ve got an exciting, emerging fashion designer coming from the famously off-beat, “fifth” fashion capital. Her unconventional approach towards silhouettes, and ability to fuse the media of fashion and art, are distinct in her first, proper collection. The main inspiration from Kegels’s Masters Collection is “The Dinner Party“, the installation by Judy Chicago from 1979, in which the feminist artist set a gigantic, triangular table for 39 women from across history. Each place setting was dedicated to a mythical or world-famous woman that played an essential role in the history of female rights. For every woman, she designed a custom place setting inspired by the story of their life.

For her collection, Kegels focused on the twelve of these settings. You can wear each of the silhouettes, but you can lay them on a table for decoration purposes as well. The whole concept was an excellent opportunity to experiment with textiles. “I tried to push the boundaries and create fabrics with a soul like embroidery, hand knits, playful drapes and materials with structure. I vacuumed old lace with a plastic fabric as this created depth in the shape of laceflowers. By creating new fabrics, I discovered that making an old fabric look modern is what I genuinely loved doing during the process of this collection“. The designer continues: “Dressing up for a dinner party has always been a magical experience for me. My line-up is based on a picture of a woman standing in front of the mirror holding a dress. Therefore, every piece in my collection has a different front and back. With these primary elements in mind, I developed the concept.” The final effect is both futuristic and retro; familiar, yet totally unknown. The look-book, photographed by Anton Fayle and art directed by Studio M, transports you to the unique world of Kegels, where nothing is as it seems. Keep Kegels’ work on your radar – and don’t forget to check out her Instagram!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.