Make A Scene. Thom Browne SS23

October 7, 2022October 6, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Thom Browne, as usual, delivered something more than a fashion show. His spring-summer 2023 presentation was a sort of dreamy and very dramatic performance. In his own words, it was “an American prom mixed with Cinderella mixed with the Paris Opera.” Gwendoline Christie provided a scene to remember. She emerged in a full-length, single-breasted, white-piped, braided blazer and some marvelous golden sandals with little effigies of Browne’s dachshund, Hector, at the front of each foot. After a slow mosey around the golden halls, she returned and began spritzing herself with cologne and brushing her locks. And then she told the guests what was to come: “Thom loves his little stories – and this is going to be a very long story.” And the story went a little bit like this: four rouge-lipped hot boys came and removed Christie’s dressing table, wearing quintessential Browne gray tailoring and kilts: salarymen at a Scottish reel. Then came 20 opera coats – the first in a tricolored arrangement – with collegiate numbers on each back. The came five frock coats and three swing skirts with petticoats, plus one white witch extra. And then all 20 coat wearers returned with their unders revealed: all polka-dot tailoring and pastels and peekaboo underwear. The best section ran 52 to 56, when the punks invaded the assembly. Vivienne Westwood was an unavoidable comparison, but in a Thom-Browne-kind-of-way.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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And Time Goes By… Givenchy SS23

October 6, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

After exiting Burberry, Riccardo Tisci should return to Givenchy. It would be a perfect homecoming, because it seems only he could understand how to direct the brand in contemporary times. Seasons come and go, and Matthew Williams still has no clue what’s Givenchy’s identity, and what’s worse, what’s his role in writing the house’s history. It’s really difficult to find the spirit of Givenchy, properly revisited, and any signs of Williams’ input in the spring-summer 2023 collection. Even Carine Roitfeld’s styling didn’t help (quite ironic – she was a key person for the brand during Tisci’s reign). The line-up was a mash-up of familiar things. We’ve got some random-looking Chanel tweeds. There’s early Demna for Balenciaga vibe. There’s Hedi Slimane’s Celine, over and over again. Hoodies worn under blazers, styled with cargo shorts, seem to be the biggest takeaway from the entire line-up, but we’ve seen that styling trick many, many times on other runways. The eveningwear had no novelty in it, as it referenced Hubert De Givenchy’s archives in form of boring „re-editions”. And it felt completely out of place after a line-up filled with denim and combats. The inconsistency of the collection was the most striking thing about it. Also, what’s the point of having an outdoor presentation in October, especially in drizzling Paris? The pouring rain made the whole event feel even more depressing and frustrating. Williams’ contract at Givenchy is coming to an end, and I doubt it will be prolonged. The brand should really consider the choice of next creative director, because with the flow of time, the brand is becoming a wreck.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Stand Together. Comme Des Garçons SS23

October 5, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

“A lamentation for the sorrow in the world today / And a feeling of wanting to stand together.” So disclosed the press notes for the return of Comme des Garçons to Paris. Rei Kawakubo is back. And trust Kawakubo to lean against the prevailing winds, then transport us further and in fewer looks because of it. Last season, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fashionland scrambled to be somber, doffing the cap. This season, as that invasion and many other frightening geopolitical scenarios rumble on, normal escapist service has been resumed. But this was anti-fashion. Kawakubo’s process is personal and private: The design and its agenda is her business. Here there were perhaps a few readable clues in a collection whose looks were abstractedly sculptural. The models were their podiums. Was look 4 a worn egg cup or a woman inverted? Was look 16 a flowery doughnut or an ironically framed metaphysical void? But you might say something else entirely about these worn impressions. The only thing we’d all agree upon is that this was not conventional clothing. The level of fabric research was intense and heightened; slickly sheeny lacquered lace and sugary-sweet, color-heaped floral jacquards. On some looks you could see the fossilized traces of “normal” pieces – a biker here, a gown there – but all were distended and distorted and blown up or reduced via twists and aggregations of imagination. Some of the models wore headpieces in folded card flowers or apparently hodgepodge steampunk-ish assemblages, half-helmet, half-crown. Created under a briefing by Gary Card and Valériane Venance, these looked to resemble virgin crants, the maiden’s garlands in which young, prematurely deceased women were buried in pre-Reformation England. They were chilling.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Back To The 1980s. Junya Watanabe SS23

October 4, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The three Comme Des Garçons brands have finally returned to the Parisian schedule: Junya Watanabe, Noir Kei Ninomiya and CDG itself. Lately, Watanabe loves a theme to stick with for an entire season, so for spring-summer 2023 we went back to 1980s. The familiar flashing camera sounds of Duran Duran’s hit “Girls on Film” kicked in and a pair of New Romantic kids emerged from the side of the runway, their hair crimped into mohawks and wedges and their makeup airbrushed on like a Patrick Nagel portrait. All of that was enriched with Junya’s signature codes, from deconstructed tailoring to the punk-rock badassery of chains and pearls. Those first two looks set the silhouette: wide, very-1980s-shouldered capes and a skinny leg punctuated by a sharp-toed boot dressed up with those chains and pearls. Some of the capes were caught by a belt in the front or cut like a trad two-button blazer, but turn them around and it was a different story: all swagger and sweeping shapes, punctuated by fabric selvedge. Shirting got the Junya treatment too; split personality button-downs were well fit on one side and unstructured on the other, a clutch of pearls holding them in place, while pleated shirtdresses came in Klaus Nomi–ish inverted triangles. About those pearls: they were worn as necklaces and integrated into garments, almost like belts, creating the kind of askew volumes Watanabe likes. He seemed to be making a case for more glamour and more drama, but without disconnecting from the realities of daily life. The jeans, whose upturned cuffs revealed a flash of red tartan, were made with Levi’s, and the color-blocked and patchwork jackets came together with Komine, a Japanese racing-gear maker.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Natural-Fake, Real-Artificial. Loewe SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

After his terrific JW Anderson show in London, I was sure that we’re not ready for what’s coming at Loewe. Jonathan Anderson‘s spring-summer 2023 collection hits different. After questioning the fakeness behind our screens, here he set out to explore the fake in nature. A giant fiberglass anthurium grew out of a hole in the floor in his show location, and he adapted the unreal-looking flower for clothing, molding bodices that wrapped around the torso and bra cups out of the suggestive blooms. These were not femme fleurs in the way fashion used to conceive of the term – for one thing the anthurium’s nubbly spadix looks like nothing so much as an erect phallus; for another the flower is poisonous. The women who will wear these dresses fancy themselves more dangerous than dainty. There’s a new element of provocation to Anderson’s work since the pandemic. And a sense of idiosyncratic, Loewe community: Dev Hynes, Caroline Polachek, Hari Nef in the front row, and on the runway in look 1, Taylor Russell, who stars alongside Timothée Chalamet in the Luca Guadagnino (also present in the f-row) film Bones and All. Russell wore a breath-taking strapless black velvet dress with panniers jutting out from the hips, a silhouette lifted out of the Baroque period via the 1920s robe de style that is once again appearing on the runways. Anderson revisited it in three other colors. Repetition was a motif in and of itself here. There was another quartet of strange dresses whose fronts were swagged and suspended from triangular wire peaks that reached up toward the face. Still more short styles – you could hardly call them dresses – were made from enameled metal painted with flowers. As for the babyless baby carriers, they looked sort of like fabric-covered versions of the gold breastplates that made such an impression on the Loewe runway a year ago. It all goes back to the anthurium flower, which Anderson’s show notes described as “a product of nature that looks like an object of design and [was] treated as such.” Another major highlight: couple of tops and trousers in the pixelated squares of Minecraft glitches. They were “this odd illusion that suddenly breaks the pattern,” like avatars from the virtual world made flesh. Real fakes. Anderson keeps pushing the limits.