All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. Christopher Kane Resort 2024

June 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Yesterday’s news of Christopher Kane entering administration and considering selling his namesake label make you realize that in this industry, truly inventive creatives have to struggle, while others get unlimited budgets and press just… because. It’s no news that running an independent creative fashion label in London is practically impossible, but the vision of Kane exiting fashion is just heartbreaking. His knack for wickedly original, sometimes even disturbing pairings of strange materials and references has earned him a reputation of a playful conjurer who with grace combines non-obvious sexiness with contemporary chic. Hopefully, the designer will find a financial solution similar to Roland Mouret, another significant London-based designer, and will continue designing under his own name with new, supportive partners behind his back.

If resort 2024 is actually the last Christopher Kane collection we will ever see, then it’s exemplary of the designer’s unique fashion vocabulary. This line-up is packed with chic-funny-simple evening ideas that look like a joy to wear. Should you detect a ’50s/’80s post-punk New Wave-ish vibe coming off it, you’re not wrong. As ever, behind every brilliant Christopher Kane party-trick, there lies something darker. This time, Christopher and his sister, Tammy, had been watching All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about Nan Goldin that weaves her groundbreaking ’70s and ’80s photography into footage of her campaign of protest against the Sackler family’s sponsorship of major museums and galleries (The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company whose main drug is the opioid Oxycontin). It struck them that the connection between the forces of super-wealth at one end of society, and the most deprived at the other were stingingly present – in the clothes. It was the sight of the cocktail dresses, lingerie, and scrappy gowns worn by Goldin’s penniless junkie LGBTQ friends that resonated. “The reason they looked so amazing in their poverty is that they were wearing second-hand and discarded clothes thrown out by the wealthy – couture, designer clothes from the ’40s and ’50s”. For them, that fit with their childhood and teenage memories of seeing the deprivation of communities in the post-industrial Glaswegian conurbation they grew up amongst. It took them back to remembering the glamour of the neatly-dressed barmaids serving in Working Men’s Clubs in the mid-to-late ’80s—another source for the sexy synthetic fitted dresses they conspired on in this collection. The subversive references they use aren’t at all visible, of course. What Kane always does is to turn the brew of associations into relevant fashion. Really, not many contemporary designers have that skill.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Slow Moments of Delight. The Row SS24

June 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The Row‘s appearances on the Parisian fashion week schedules are always slow moments of delight. The spring-summer 2024 by collection makes you truly question all that pointless noise that other brands are emitting to just be noticed for an Insta-second. A selection of the 80 looks for spring, designed and dreamed up by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, appeared on mannequins through an enfilade of handsome hôtel particulier salons on Place Vendôme, punctuated with hand-picked furniture from Parisian galleries, naturalistic floral arrangements, and waiters serving plates of red currants. There was no music; simply an ambiance of calm grandeur suggesting a certain cultivated, very Parisian sensibility. That got perfectly conveyed by the clothes.

The collection was introduced with an explanation that an expanded range of men’s wear yielded pieces that overlapped with the women’s offer. Can you spot the knee-length, black leather trench that reappears throughout the lineup? The leisure shirts with their retro stripes? The jeans that have been skillfully shredded at the knees, enhancing their desirability? Note, too, how the tailoring that seemed intentionally boxy and generous on a female frame is as intentionally streamlined on the male counterpart. Although the designers were absent, their presence was felt across the spectrum of this covetable wardrobe: laid-back layering; intellectual silhouettes; and lived-in looks that might be as basic as a button-front shirt and chinos. For every item in a dressier register – see the hand-embroidered slip dress worn over a gray T-shirt (very Martin Margiela), or the pumps with higher heels – the collection suggested a casual confidence. The lineup was also particularly palette-diverse, as primary hues alternated with pastels – see the bold red high-neck dress and pale pink cashmere polo. An outfit that comprised an outdoorsy jacket, pine green corduroy shirt, and jeans was at once erudite and everyday, as though it conveyed some admixture of vintage inspiration and social studies. New versions of signature bag styles were unapologetically capacious and as faithful to The Row as any logo. We all know that Paris style is ineffable and cannot be reduced to a single archetype. But the studio here can absorb the local culture and benefits from the proximity to manufacturers in France and Italy, where a large part of the collections are made. If a retail location to rival the stores in Los Angeles, New York, and London would give The Row its Paris bona fides, let’s agree for now that the brand has definitely perfected its je ne sais quoi.

Men’s – PharreLl’s Take. Louis Vuitton SS24

June 21, 2023June 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

In anticipation of Pharrell Williams‘ debut collection for Louis Vuitton, the actual meaning of a “fashion designer” became a big discourse on the internet. Do we even need a skilled designer when a brand like Louis Vuitton hires a big (and undoubtedly stylish) entertainment industry name instead? What we’ve seen yesterday in Paris was a show (more of a business-, than fashion-, noting the Grammy-like front row featuring everyone from Beyonce to Rihanna) in its purest sense. The Voice of Fire choir singing loud; the Pont Neuf and what seems half of Paris lit up and ready to accommodate the mega-event; the Jay-Z concert afterwards… and what about the actual clothes? There was plenty of merch, as well as true eye-candies, that’s for sure. But Pharrell seemed to approach the debut more like a styling exercise. A bit of Nigo and Kim Jones menswear sensitivity here, a couple of Wales Bonner and Bode touches here, a sprinkle of Virgil Abloh nods there. The Karl Lagerfeld-level ego was palpable as well (even a Chanel-like tweed jacket popped in one of the looks). As you might already know, the garments were heavily covered with the green pixelated Damier duds, and all sorts of LV monograms known to man. Of course, the most powerful of all were the accessories, the brand’s primary money-makers. Zingily colored Keepalls and Almas and Neverfulls and Speedys, worn in clusters. To be truly honest, the collection wasn’t neither bad… or outstandingly good. But it will definitely sell loads.

Berlinesque. Anonymous Club Resort 2024

June 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Shayne Oliver keeps on teasing the fashion industry with his next, creative steps. Since announcing the relaunch of Hood by Air in 2020, the designer has been teasing a number of projects: first was “Prologue,” the HBA capsule modeled by Naomi Campbell; then came a preview of his eponymous ready-to-wear label at New York Fashion Week in February of last year, followed by Anonymous Club, the elusive talent incubator he formally introduced last year. Coming soon is an art exhibition in Berlin, where he recently moved. These projects don’t abide by industry schedules. They arrive when Oliver is ready.

A year after its first drop, Oliver is back with the second installment of Anonymous Club, and with it some newfound structure. “I’m working to create more clarity, that’s part of what this campaign is about,” he said. He was referring both to this lookbook, shot at Schinkel Pavillon, which features the designer Stefano Pilati, a Berliner for the last couple of years, and to a campaign the label dropped last week on Instagram, which stars Telfar Clemens, Raul Lopez, and Patia Borja, who also appear in this slideshow as cutouts. “Anonymous Club is about friendship and camaraderie with people that share like-minded ideas,” Oliver said. The lineup itself is a tightly edited collection of staples with the Shayne Oliver twist in a limited color palette consisting of black, beige, and neon green. There’s the pagoda shoulders Oliver often presented at Hood by Air, his usual club-ready leather jackets and trousers, and a run of oversized utility jackets. More interesting are a t-shirt with its shoulders raised to hide the neck but sloped to the regular shoulder apex, and a flared skirt with two jacket sleeves as part of the front drape. To Oliver’s credit, as pervasive as the Hood by Air aesthetic he and Lopez introduced a decade ago is today, his clothes are imbued with a certain authenticity. The show-stealer in this lookbook is a three-headed chihuahua, a reference to Cerberus, the hound of Hades in Greek mythology that guards the gates of the Underworld. Oliver explains it came from a dark place: back in the HBA days, he felt in need of a watchdog to look over ideas and protect the “naive period in the creative process.” He feels similarly about Anonymous Club now. “Sometimes some aspects of things need to be protected for it to blossom into something,” he explained.

Raunchy Hot! DsQuared2 SS24

June 17, 2023June 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Nobody serves raunchy hotness (and sex) in Milano like DsQuared2‘s Caten twins. The backdrop scenario from yesterday’s spring-summer 2024 fashion show: a penthouse overlooking Miami Beach where porn star Rocco Siffredi was (pretending to) film (what else?!) a porn movie starring Julia Fox enjoying herself (euphemistically speaking) with an unidentified partner on a four poster bed hidden from view (barely) by a screen. Guests attending the show were treated to the aforementioned vignette serving as the catwalk’s backdrop, with an aside of moaning by Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby.” Everyone familiar with Dean and Dan Caten knows their irrepressible naughty, funny streak. But here they surpassed themselves. “It’s steamy. Sexual versus proper. WASP-y country club versus raunchy. Privileged upper crust trying out adult entertainment,” they chanted in unison. “Elites meet snob. Snob meets knob.” The collection was a barely-there rendition of the Catens’ 2000s mash-ups, reduced to a minimum of body coverage. Yet the humor made the bawdiness of the show outrageously entertaining. After an endless parade of preppy-golf-tennis wear hybridizations with plenty of exposed underwear (for guys) and a series of almost-in-a-state-of-undress minidresses, one skimpier than the other (for girls), out came Fox, clad in a virginal white lace babydoll, all frills and ruches (an homage to ’90s porn star Cicciolina perhaps?) But the cherry on the over-the-top cake was the finale, with Rocco Siffredi taking to the catwalk and opening his blue blazer to reveal a red T-shirt emblazoned with the acronym V.I.P. – Very Important Penis. I’m here for sex and fun having a big return to fashion, and DsQuared2 leads the game.