The Attitude. Batsheva SS23

September 16, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Batsheva‘s spring-summer 2023 fashion show was a bold and charismatic scene. Ben’s Kosher Deli on West 38th street was this season’s venue, and it was filled with Batsheva Hay‘s friends, muses and clients – both sitting in the dining booths and walking the runway. This season, the designer wanted to challenge herself. “I started thinking about Gunne Sax, because I’ve so Laura Ashley’d myself out that I was like, ‘Let’s go into this more ’70s kind of vibe,’” she said after the show. “I was appalled by how I continually make such frumpy garments, and I thought, the only thing I can do is try to do something sexy, show more skin and make it sexy… or whatever.” The sexiness was there in the fabrics, like the white mesh with black flocked velvet stars that was used on a short princess sleeve cropped top with Batsheva’s signature ruffle on the chest, worn with a matching mid-rise maxi skirt (complete with red lace underwear visible underneath). It was also there in the Working Girl-esque ensemble of a slim button down shirt tucked into a pencil skirt with a peplum, all done on a red polka dot on white fabric and accessorized with a floral print tie and red polka dot mesh gloves. Hay’s challenge to show more skin resulted in bikini tops, lots of PVC, and a wide variety of shorts including bloomers – in an all-over bow fabric with a corset-inspired cotton shirt with a sailor collar, and modeled by Kembra Pfahler – which seemed to epitomize the vibe of this collection. The cast included Jordan Roth, Hari Nef, and Jemima Kirke and Alex Cameron – the couple opened the show in sort of matching white PVC wedding looks. “This felt like a really big show,” Hay said, “Post-COVID, I’ve never done anything that felt as grown-up, so I kind of looked back to where I started, and largely I am still using the same shapes, but they look completely different because I’ve changed proportions, I’ve changed fabrics.” She added, “I wanted to make it like it was me, but also kind of unrecognizable.” There were a few gowns that may not have fit into her demand for more skin, but were attractive in the confidence of their shape: a spaghetti strap dress made from a pink with black polka dots taffetta fabric was cinched at the waist like a cummerbund, and overflowing at the bust with ruffles. Another came in a purple iridescent fabric with a slight sweetheart neckline and a big bow at the waist, and a high-low overlay over a column skirt. It was Dynasty, it was over-the-top, and it was unmistakably Batsheva.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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What Shall I Wear? Tory Burch SS23

September 15, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Tory Burch‘s renaissance keeps on giving. Spring-summer 2023 collection is yet another gorgeous line-up coming from this New York-based, well-established designer. For context, Burch wrote a new forward to a just-released re-edition of a book by Claire McCardell, the mid-century designer known for easy-on, easy-off dresses when high fashion was still a made-to-measure business. A year ago Burch was talking up McCardell’s designs and the ways in which they served to “unencumber” women. Something clicked, and resulted in an on-going creative dialogue between two American, female designers. “I started thinking about when I first moved to New York in the ’90s,” said Burch backstage of her fashion show. “Even then, women didn’t want to be restricted, so we spent a lot of time developing fabrics that had all kinds of stretch and pieces that you could wear in different ways. I wanted it to be really focused.” The models skimmed in flat slingbacks or mules – “if the shoe hurts, give it away,” is a McCardellism. They wore a modular wardrobe of fine gauge knits, double layer skirts (the fitted upper part covering a sheer lower part that hit the mid-calf), or tube skirts over capri-length leggings. These looks didn’t obscure or deny a woman’s form, but nor did they enhance it necessarily. The best way to put it is that they were true to a woman’s body, and they exuded a certain confidence because of it. Tossed over the top could be a boxy man’s blazer, or a gold leather jacket, or a tech-y fabric raincoat. The effect was streamlined and simple, but not quite minimal. There was too much color and, when the evening looks emerged at the end, too much ornament to qualify for that. Burch’s more formal outfits combined a tunic-length hourglass-shaped sleeveless top in suiting fabric with a soft lace-edged slip, or layered a sheer panel over a slip dress that could be cut from sari fabric or embellished with mirror paillettes. McCardell’s reissued book is called “What Shall I Wear? The What, Where, When, and How Much of Fashion“. She didn’t have much to say about denim, but we will say this, Burch’s jeans – high-waisted and faded, with the hint of a crease down the front – are the best of the season so far.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Hot Versatility. Peter Do SS23

September 15, 2022September 15, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Peter Do has delivered one of the most convincing, coherent and desirable collections of this entire New York Fashion Week. If Helmut Lang, the designer, showed collections in 2022, then this might have been the effect – it’s this good. What gave Do this sort of new confidence is the official launch of menswear. The spring-summer 2023 show was opened with a men’s look: the double breasted jacket fastened with a single button over a white shirt, both with a large triangle cutout exposing a flash of muscled back, over a pair of full satin pants with open side seams that tapered at the ankle over those signature boots. The model was Lee Jeno of the K-Pop group NCT who has 3.4 million followers on Instagram. Celebrity influencers will play their part, but more important: Do’s exacting, even methodical approach is equal to his ambition. As with his women’s, tailoring is central to Do’s aesthetic. In fact, the offering is more or less unisex, in addition to being quite sexy. “During the fitting process we try everything on both, 80% is pretty genderless,” he explained. For him, for her, for them: over the course of 60 looks – this was one of New York’s bigger shows – Do set out his vision. It involves deconstruction in the form of suits slit open at the hem to reveal their inner workings, minimal leaning ornamentation like tone-on-tone suture stitches over seams, and the two- or three-in-one versatility that he’s built into his work from the start. Waistbands can be adjusted to accommodate different sized hips and clever pleated skirts are attached to belts so they can be open and closed, almost like curtains. Shirts can play it straight, meaning buttoned from collar to hem, or they can be worn wrapped around the waist for the undone look he favored here. Another novelty, this one on the sustainable tip: a tank and pants in what looked like patent leather were made from discarded shrimp shells, a food industry waste product.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Ukrainian Heritage. Bevza SS23

September 15, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Svitlana Bevza of the label Bevza is one of the more than 10 million Ukrainians who fled their homes when Russia invaded their country over six months ago, only nine days after Bevza showed her autumn-winter 2022 collection in New York. After a month of staying at her home in Kyiv with air sirens ringing, she fled with her children for two days by bus, leaving her husband behind. (Men between 18 and 60 in Ukraine have mandatory military conscription.) Bevza first went to the Czech Republic, and a month and a half later, she settled in a small town in Portugal, where she currently lives. Since then, Bevza has only returned to Ukraine twice, for less than a week at a time. The designer’s emotional experience, a combination of alienation and perseverance, culminated in a packed show held in the stark interiors at the empty assay office of 30 Wall Street. At the start of the show, a projector showed a massive yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag as a recording of her voice played, calling for a moment of silence for Ukrainian lives lost during the war.

Bevza has always been fiercely proud of her heritage. Her brand, one of the largest in her native Kyiv, is built on subtly weaving craft-driven traditional Ukrainian motifs into her minimalist designs. There were those symbolic moments throughout this season, including the hair, which was done in a Cossack style with a singular sharp bang cutting across the forehead, and traditional Ukrainian singing spliced with modern beats by a Ukrainian DJ. (Bevza’s show was produced by an entirely Ukrainian team; fellow Kyiv designer and LVMH nominee Anton Belinskiy styled it.) Those signature traditional Ukrainian embroideries were evident. The bust of one icy blue slip dress featured a knit of traditional Ukrainian embroidery – an unlikely but ultimately beautiful combination. A keptaryk, a traditional Ukraine vest fastened by knots, was produced in a beautiful thick navy wool and paired with low-slung vegan leather trousers. There was a nod to war too: a bulletproof vest, a longtime motif for the label, was fashioned into a curve-skimming, floor-length dress.

Bevza also used the runway as her platform to showcase one of the biggest issues affecting Ukraine right now: wheat. The theme was already baked into the setting: Large wheeled trays with loaves of bread dotted the corners of the space. Ukraine is considered the breadbasket of Europe, and wheat is embedded within the country’s customs. “When you’re making a proposal to marry somebody, you bring bread with you. When you’re going to somebody’s new home, you should always bring bread,” says Bevza. “Even when you’re saying goodbye to the dead, you used to bring bread.” Currently, there is a crisis: fields of wheat are being destroyed by Russian missiles, and that’s predicted to have harrowing effects on the world’s wheat supply for months to come. The importance of the grain was translated through the use of wheat spikelets. Even before the war, Bevza produced spikelet necklaces and earrings. This time, that golden spikelet necklace was blackened, symbolizing the burning of the wheat fields. Silk skirts—paired with itty-bitty bandeau tops – boasted an elegant hourglass silhouette thanks to how the fabric was gathered at the sides, a nod to how Ukrainian women centuries ago would gather wheat in the fields. Ukraine can be a tricky place for designers to define themselves; some heavily use Ukrainian traditional motifs in their designs, and others opt to go their own way sans any reference to their roots. Both choices are of course fine, but Bevza possesses the stellar ability to seamlessly translate her homeland – and its crisis – through a contemporary and, in this season’s case, very strong lens.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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New Wave. Maryam Nassir Zadeh SS23

September 13, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave filmmakers, has sadly passed away today. He invented a resolutely modern, intensely free vision of film-making. Godard’s storylines mixed up time and space, changing the idea of a fixed narrative. He filled cinema with poetry and philosophy. Also, his sense of visual aesthetic, from “Breathless” to “Pierrot Le Fou“, has left an ever-lasting legacy. If there is one designer who conveys that Nouvelle Vague style with ease, even subconciously, it’s the New York-based Maryam Nassir Zadeh. Whenever I see her collections, I have an impression of watching a pack of contemporary New Wave women (and men) materialize IRL.

Zadeh began her show notes with the word “waves”, and she was thinking not only about the azure waters lapping on Mediterranean shores (the designer spent part of the summer on the idyllic Greek island Hydra) but also of time. In 2013 Zadeh first dipped her toe into design with accessories and then moved into clothing – and MNZ quickly created a niche in the downtown scene. “What I’m known for is making timeless, elevated basics,” she said after her spring show, which veered from that formula this season. It was a full-circle moment: Zadeh came back to the Sara D. Roosevelt handball court where she had shown before, located just across the street from her studio; the cast and audience were full of friends. The lineup was infused with the freedom of summer dressing—or undressing—the instinctual improvisation of wearing a towel as a sarong, say. Modesty is not a consideration in the MNZ universe, which is body positive and empowering, and that is an extension of how Zadeh lives her life. On vacation, she said, “I was dressing in ways that were like half naked, half covered.” But that’s only part of the story: “I feel like there’s a fusion of the domestic element of my life [as a working mother], but then there’s sort of a tension between that and being free.” The idea of domesticity came through in a literal way; the designer worked with interior textiles like tablecloths and bath towels. Similarly, the idea of finding “space in between” was evident in such garments as half skirts. How these will translate on a rack would be a question, save for the fact that they might not ever land there. Zadeh explained that many of the materials she used have been in her personal collection for decades. Not wanting to cut them up, she worked around them, allowing the textiles to guide the patterns and some no-sew pieces in ways that she feels will lead her in exciting new directions. Thus her reworkings represented a dialogue with fabric and the sum of her past experiences and relationships. It was the lightest pieces that best captured the ephemerality of memory and emphasized the space that exists between the body and the cloth. A polka-dot dress, for example, was the color of sky in the early morning; a yellow woven men’s shirt was tethered by knit cuffs and collars. Layering heavier materials over lighter ones was another way to emphasize the delicacy of the fabrics. Garters and bras added a whiff of the boudoir to the proceedings. A jersey dress with a beautifully shaped scoop neck in front and back was paired with a bra, which by now has fully come out from under. The idea of apron skirts and tying things on is one that is surfacing in many collections. In some ways this harks back to classical precedents and manipulation of material rather than construction. “I wanted to be natural,” Zadeh said, and there’s nothing more so than the human form, which was the designer’s focus this season. What she calls her reworks are works in progress – as is life.