Late Capitalism. Conner Ives SS24

September 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

We live in the times of late capitalism. It’s also how Conner Ives entitled his spring-summer 2024 collection, which starting point was a TikTok video he stumbled across a few months ago of a girl live-blogging her experience queuing for a fashion sample sale in New York as smoke from the Canadian wildfires bathed the city in an ominous orange glow. “As much as it felt like the end of days, there was also a dark humor to it,” Ives said at a preview. “It’s the beginning of the end of the world, and we’re waiting in line at a sample sale.” “Late Capitalism” – a collection that invitates to talk more openly about the economic realities of what keeps the fashion world moving – is “a subject that makes me uncomfortable, which made me feel like it was something worth talking about,” he said. Ives is one of a generation of designers for whom sustainability is something of a given, meaning he hasn’t telegraphed his eco-credentials all that loudly in the past (although with his signature approach of lending deadstock and upcycled vintage clothes a glamorous new life, you didn’t have to dig very deep to notice it). But he now feels a greater urgency to share the various methods by which he’s carved out his own, more responsible lane. “I think part of me didn’t want to get up on my soapbox, as I wasn’t sure if anyone really cared,” Ives said, noting that in his few years of doing production at scale, he’s repurposed nearly 15,000 T-shirts destined for scrap yards, while a new partnership with Depop will see him use the platform to source bulk raw material for production. And he’s open to talking about the fact that the system still isn’t perfect. Sure, he’s made a firm commitment to only staging a runway show once a year, but he still needs to produce lookbooks in between to allow him to sell year-round and keep his business afloat. “I’m very aware there’s an irony to the ‘Late Capitalism’ collection being an answer to getting more items into stores,” he acknowledged.

So, then, to the clothes. In his signature spirit of character-driven styling, Ives’s lookbook- photographed by Johnny Dufort, and starring the TikTok-favorite model of the moment Alex Consani – began with one of his “archetypes,” a T-shirt and skirt decorated with a swan motif as an ode to Natalie Portman’s doomed ballerina in Black Swan. Once again, there was plenty of fun to be had identifying the various figures he was paying homage to, from Charlotte York to Carmela Soprano. Ives also continued his journey of expanding out from the spliced T-shirt dresses that made his name as a fashion editor favorite, continuing to develop his tailoring and elevate his eveningwear offering. Highlights included a series of T-shirt dresses with 1930s-inspired trumpet skirts made of recycled jersey, a sheer bias-cut dress cut from baseball jersey material, and a swishy black halter gown with a mother-of-pearl shell as a belt buckle. But perhaps the most striking looks came at the end, in the form of a dazzlingly intricate dress strung together from 9,000 soda can tabs, and a slip made from cowrie shells strung together in a bias lattice. Cowrie shells, being one of the earliest forms of currency in human history as Ives pointed out, is another nod to the collection’s meditations on commerce.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Ceremonies & Roses. Simone Rocha SS24

September 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Simone Rocha staged her spring-summer 2024 show in the rehearsal space at the English National Ballet. “I love the rise and fall of doing a show,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a big spectacle, sometimes it really brings people in.” By shows, she also had wedding ceremonies on her mind. The cake-inspired tiers of appliqué on white tulle dresses and the sound of silver “wedding” bells tinkling on slippers, sleeves and bags. “It’s almost fragmented,” the designer said of Frederic Sanchez’s music for the show. “It’s that disturbed feeling, all the emotions of a rehearsal… the nerves!” Despite the sense of tension Rocha set out to create, there’s little chance of a bride wearing one of these dresses getting cold feet the night before. The show’s highlight: instead of a bride holding a bouquet, fresh roses were bunched between layers of sheer tulle, and fabric versions were manipulated into dresses and jackets. Models carried single stems fashioned from cotton or pearls, and bare legs were decorated with red rose tattoos. As a motif, it was equal parts enchanting and fragrant.

Strangeness In The Mundane. Jw Anderson SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Finally, a collection this season that makes the viewer truly wonder. Nobody transforms the mundane into extraordinary like Jonathan Anderson. Plasticine – that’s what the blue hoodie and white shorts were molded from at the beginning of the JW Anderson spring-summer 2024 fashion show in London. Anderson discovered that Plasticine is still being manufactured in Northern Ireland, the place of his birth, plus it makes adults smile as much now as back in their childhoods. That was an emblematic starter for a collection that had Anderson’s collection circling back to the youth-based energy of his brand. “It was kind of re-going back to find a new path,” he said. In the summer he “saw all these girls and boys hanging out wearing biker jackets and cargos.” Street observation – seeing the generic clothes young people really wear, but with a different attitude in each generation – put him in the mood to think about “what happens when you focus on reduction. It wasn’t about a lot of tricks. Kind of a cleanser.” Adding glamour to the MA-1 archetype by inflating it as a cocoon and having feathers explode from the seams was another cheerful moment, equally beautiful. And putting something that might have been a Hula-Hoop up the skirt of a knitted dress. Playfulness balanced with practicality might be a way to sum it up. Love!

Behind The Scenes. Molly Goddard SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

This season, Molly Goddard played with the notion of a “behind the scenes” moment: what’s happening behind the surface, or closed doors or… the clothes. The spring-summer 2024 show took place at Christie’s auction house on King Street, the other occasions upon which the designer would tend to visit were during the set up of displays. She elaborated: “When there are these masterpieces just lying on the floor: it’s kind of amazing to see and very exciting, which I guess in some way is connected to the collection.” Goddard fashioned a fair few masterpieces of her own in a lineup that focused on nudging the mechanics of garments to the surface, turning them inside out in order to create a patina of production. She said she’d done her research in the National Theatre Costume Hire, examining the stitched clockwork of garments ranging in style from Regency to contemporary. Long skirts were shirred at the hip to create drape down to edged froths of pale ruffled petticoat. The trademark tulle skirts were teamed with loosely corseted tops whose sheerness exposed the geography of boning and corsetry that defined their gentle geography. A dusty pink woolen cardigan was edged with a two-inch strip of satin, like some old granny blanket left bundled in the cupboard of a spare room. Washed out red rose prints used on more skirts and knitted into another cardigan – magenta paneled at the shoulder – added to the sense of comfortable, domestic nostalgia. A precise excavation of the deeply familiar but also overlooked, this was a quietly masterful collection. Said Goddard: “What I enjoy most is when I get really stuck in to how to make clothes; the techniques and the fabrics and the fit.” That pleasure in Goddard’s process was evident in its result.

Time For Fun. Batsheva SS24

September 15, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Batsheva Hay is in her daring, experimental era: for the past few seasons she has been pushing against the limits that delineate what her brand can be. “I have no classical fashion background, so I learned with cut-and-sew garments, and it was all handed off,” she explained. “I used to feel like I couldn’t work with the garments. I had to hand things over, then pick them up, and it was very nice for my lifestyle. Then I’d go home and nurse my baby and then hand her off, pick the clothes up, pick out the buttons or whatever.” She laughed at the familiar juggling of so many women who go home at the end of a workday for a different kind of work. “But now I find the really fun part is tearing things, shredding things, adding little bustles, pinning things onto things. And I do think that’s an important part of what distinguishes my brand from other brands; that there’s a little bit of naivete in it. It’s not quite feral, but just the amateurness of it all.” For sping-summer 2024, Batsheva went The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel with all the 1950s volumes and colours, but also in the sense of humor. These “grotesque experiments,” as Hay calls them, involved her pinning a surplus of cotton placemats and oven mitts that she had lying around. “I just started safety-pinning them on my body, and I thought, Oh, it’s so sexy,” While the oven-mitt dress feels very much like oven mitts that have been safety-pinned together when you’re just “being goofy,” the experimentation did take her to some groovy places. Like the dress made from delicately embroidered cotton placemats, which has a sort of romantic quality to it, and the top made from floral-print cotton placemats, which Hay draped over a white cotton “cheerleader full-circle skirt” with turquoise godets further propped up by a hoop skirt underneath. If it all sounds a little nutty, it is, but it also feels wearable and oddly accessible. Hay expanded, elongated, or otherwise stuffed some of her go-to silhouettes, like the turquoise dress modeled by Amy Fine Collins, which is one of her bestsellers, and the high-waist, pleated skirt in turquoise with embroidered kissy prints, which she makes every season in different fabrications. The designer was also having fun at her presentation inside the BondST restaurant at Hudson Yards, where models holding little number signs walked around guests, midcentury couture show style, while Hay narrated the looks and then opened the floor for questions and comments from the audience.