AMI SPRING 2021 MENSWEAR

“Doing a physical show is a kind of political thing,” says Ami’s Alexandre Mattiussi, elaborating that amid the pandemic and crumbling political situations around the world, he thinks “fashion needs to find humility in the situation.” The Ami version of humility might sound quite dramatic: Beside the Seine in the quatrième, Mattiussi held a fashion show on a black wood runway complete with a soundtrack by DJ Jennifer Cardini and a cast of famous models like Clement Chabernaud, Amalia Vairelli, Audrey Marnay, and Georgina Grenville. Its existence, at 8 p.m. on a cloudy Paris night, was both a risk—COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in Paris—and celebratory, an homage to the city’s deep relationship with and love of fashion.

To counter the exuberance of the affair, Matiussi sent out clothing with a relaxed spirit. He described his spring 2021 men’s and women’s collections as “sophisticated but not pretentious.” The slim plaid maxiskirts and black wool LBDs proved the point for women, the louche seafoam and chocolate suits and baggy shorts did it for men. A series of mesh tanks, styled throughout with vacation-y beaded necklaces, emphasized the chill vibes.

But so much comfy, slouchy, pleasant clothing can be done a disservice by such a flashy show format. Mattiussi’s clothing is quite elegant in its form and fit—see Vairelli’s white wool midi—but perhaps a more intimate show would have helped showcase the craftsmanship and care that went into the collection. During Paris’s lockdown, the designer went into his studio alone, connecting with his 160 employees online to make the garments come to life. This collection is a testament to their ability to collaborate as a team and make it through one of the toughest times. Peeling back the curtain on that process might have helped the clothes really shine.

Source: VogueRunway

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DRIES VAN NOTEN SPRING 2021 MENSWEAR

Dries Van Noten is speaking with wry cheerfulness about how COVID-19 has made him rewire the design habit of a lifetime. “You know how fond I was of fashion shows? The whole collection was built up around the idea of putting it on a catwalk. But this time, it was thinking about clothes for a shoot.” With a runway out of the question, Van Noten found himself in the completely new territory of directing photographs and a film. That’s a first in a 34-year career. “Because we’ve never had an advertising campaign. We lost things, but we learned things. It’s pushing a new kind of creativity.”

Another first is the fact that Van Noten has amalgamated his women’s and men’s collections into one—a process of rationalization (cost reducing, too), which was already underway before the pandemic. When you dive into the photographs—partly shot on a breezy day on a Rotterdam beach—the design symbiosis makes total sense: board shorts, Bermudas, easy cotton jackets worn by both boys and girls. “We wanted to work around beauty [that] evokes energy—not one that makes you dream or linger on things that are past, which makes you nostalgic,” he says. “It had to push you to the future, to give energy.”

Van Noten asked the Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen to shoot the images and film. “She captures the moment in a very good way. There’s a directness and she works fast and spontaneously.” Sassen is in the Netherlands, not far from Van Noten’s Antwerp base. Creative groups banding together to make fashion imagery happen locally is becoming a super-interesting phenomenon in every country now. So when it came to making the film, the socially distanced crew moved into a studio in Amsterdam, and the models started dancing in front of what looks curiously like a ’60s-type light show, or possibly some sort of neo-rave type of thing.

In fact, the source is the very much earlier work of the New Zealand artist Len Lye, whose pioneering technique of painting on celluloid film predates psychedelia by decades. “He was such a discovery for me. He started to do this in the late ’20s, early ’30s.” Working with the Len Lye Foundation, Van Noten developed the prints that run through the collection, “psychedelic sun, sunshine and moons, light bars, and palm trees.” And quite brilliant effects they are, for a designer whose innovation must always move forward through print—the attraction for his art-conscious customers—and through pragmatism.

Tough as the times may be, Van Noten has all the elements empathetically calibrated for what people might want to look and feel like next summer. There are jackets made of “two layers of cotton [that] are foiled and slightly padded, very soft, nice to touch”; black papery cotton dresses with cutout necklines; an oversized parka printed inside and out with a new inkjet technique; lots more. Van Noten is never one to hype or overstate any situation. He might, one suspects, even have enjoyed some of the ways the creative chips are falling in the face of the 2020 emergency. “I’m quite happy,” he reflected. “The limitations are not always limitations for me anymore.”

Source: VogueRunway

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PFW 2021 - UN REVE SUR LA COTE D’AZUR by DARA SENDERS in collaboration with EMILY BRICKEL EDELSON of CHIC SKETCH

Debuting today, Dara Senders presents her new collection UN REVE SUR LA COTE D’AZUR and digital presentation/ look book in collaboration with Emily Brickel Edelson, co-founder and lead fashion illustrator of Chic Sketch.

A mixture of pastels, muted jewel tones, and gilded metallics sets the color pallet for this collection. Hues reminiscent of a bright sunny day that leads into a magnificent sunset over the Mediterranean Sea and lavender fields. The array of sophisticated ready-to-wear separates such as ruffled floral print organza and textured metallic threaded chiffon statement blouses and kimonos provide the ease and comfort of day to night dressing. Romantic cocktail dresses and flowy evening gowns sit alongside plenty of sequin numbers to make life and dressing more fabulous. Whether you are dressing for a zoom call for business or pleasure, a dinner date, all the way to an intimate outdoor gathering with family and friends Dara Senders’ 2020/2021 collection will have you looking your best.   

All garments are made to order in Paris, France by Dara Senders’ team of couturiers with an incredible attention to detail and craftsmanship. Each garment made is cut with the brand’s innovative pattern making technology that allows each garment to fit with perfection and ease from sizes XS-3XL. The first drop of Un Rêve Sur La Côte D’azur by Dara Senders will launch for pre-sale on October 5th on DaraSenders.com with a scheduled Holiday delivery. The second drop is scheduled to launch on the designer’s website for pre-sale at the end of October. The Pret-a-Porter collection prices under $400.00 USD while the couture collection prices under $700 USD. 

“Designing luxurious well-tailored clothing that can elevate a woman’s style and allows her to feel beautiful from the inside-out and vice-versa, no matter her physique is what I find most fulfilling! I believe all women, no matter their shape and size deserve to feel and look fashion forward, fabulous every day.” - Dara Senders explains.

Given the world’s current climate with COVID-19, Dara knew she had to think outside of the box to create a visually captivating, zero contact, digital presentation to not risk the health and safety of others that a traditional fashion show or editorial photoshoot may have. She loved the idea of two female entrepreneurs joining creative forces to create a unique way of bringing her brands collection to life. This is how the colorful collaboration between Emily Brickel Edelson, co-founder and lead fashion illustrator of Chic Sketch and Dara Senders came into fruition.  Dara explains, “I knew collaborating with Emily Brickel Edelson to artistically and visually showcase the ambiance of  my collection as its presentation would be a perfect fit. Through her art she truly captured my collection’s ambiance and gave a 2D presentation movement, emotion and depth. It is so wonderful when young women entrepreneurs can come together and support each other wholeheartedly!”

Both women have worked closely to tell the captivating story of “Un Rêve Sur La Côte D’azur” by Dara Senders. Through Emily’s art and renowned fashion illustrations in which visually showcases this collection magnificently,  tickles one’s senses of completely emerging into the French Riviera. “On behalf of Chic Sketch, we are thrilled to collaborate with Dara Senders for her new 2020/2021 Collection. Dara's designs are the epitome of what fashion forward women want to wear to feel beautiful at any size. Through the Dara Senders’ collection, in collaboration with my artwork, one thing we have in common is wanting women to always feel and look beautiful and inspiring women globally to live their dream lives. Now more than ever, we all need something to look forward to and something to wear that reminds us of who we are and gives us a reason to glam up everyday with a little sparkle and a lot of chic!" says Emily Brickel.

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KENZO SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR

With premonition that couldn’t have been planned, the eeriest experience last season occurred at the Kenzo show. Editors who had rushed from Milan to Paris like we were on the run from the pandemic turned up to Felipe Oliveira Baptista’s show to find a human-size plastic tunnel system erected within a rose garden. There, guests were let in through one hatch, which was then dramatically shut and sealed before the next hatch was opened, as if we were going into sci-fi quarantine. For his sophomore collection for Kenzo this season, set in the same garden, the designer wanted to reuse the tunnel. “But the company that built it went bankrupt because of COVID,” he said during a preview. The tragicomedy spoke for itself.

Like his first show—its set designed before anyone expected the virus—he didn’t specifically intend for his new proposal to feel unnerving. Oliveira Baptista, a nature obsessive with roots in the luxuriant hills of the Azores, wants to instill his work with the harmonious and optimistic aspects of the environment, themes that are also core to Kenzo. He strictly uses recyclable plastic, is working with WWF to double the global population of tigers (Kenzo’s trademark), and has a number of other environmentally conscious projects in the works. The veiled beekeeper suits that opened his collection, however, inevitably felt more Contagion than Honeyland, the 2019 documentary about a beekeeper in rural Macedonia, which served as a reference.

The film portrays the contrast between its protagonist, a lady who respects the bees and only ever takes the honey she needs to survive—“half for me, and half for you”—and her industrious neighbors, who deplete the natural resources and end up killing the bees. “It’s one of the most ancient collaborations between man and nature,” Oliveira Baptista said, explaining that the image of the beekeeper came to him amid what he sees as a moment in which humankind is bargaining with the ecosystem. “I wanted to express something about the fragility of the situation we are in. Everyone goes to the low of the situation—fear and anxiety—but we go to the high: dreaming of optimism and a future and going back to the things we’ve been missing.”

That may be the case, but the elements with which he imbued his collection felt more geared toward survival than picnics—even if there was a jar of honey on guests’ seats. An adaptable coat with multi-pocketing could be wrapped up into itself and transformed into a bum bag. Out of the zipped bottom of round leather bags came a separate giant shopping bag. A cocoon coat with a caped hood layered over its body easily tapped into said sci-fi quarantine vibe, or perhaps the silhouette of a killer in a 1990s horror film. And floral prints from the Kenzo archives, which had been faded to look clinical and blurry, evoked the effect of flowers sticking to a window in the rain, like something you might have seen in confinement.

Oliveira Baptista’s perhaps inadvertent tendencies for the dystopian serve to his advantage. If dark undercurrents didn’t make their way into his delicate veils, lace raincoats, and little summer dresses, they wouldn’t put up any resistance to the flower-power universe of Kenzo. Rather than cute, there was a feeling of self-protection about his collection that hit an obvious nerve in a time when the environment is fighting back, giving us a taste of our own medicine. “We don’t even know what to be afraid of and what to believe in. The whole idea of protection becomes abstract,” the designer said, summing up the broad spectrum of sociopolitical current affairs.

Source: VogueRunway

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Wolk Morais Spring 2021 Ready-To-Wear

Brian Wolk and Claude Morais made their spring 2021 film over 26 nights in Los Angeles. They’d pull up at the model’s or actor’s or fashion consultant’s house with a garment bag and shoot without even leaving their car. The result is a testament to the charm of LA living, wildfires notwithstanding. Equally, it showcases the ingenuity of Wolk and Morais’s upcycling and the multi-generational appeal of their tailoring.

“We wanted to create a collection that was not only responsible and sustainable, but also content that tells a story about what’s going on right now,” Wolk explained over a Zoom call from a smoky Hollywood. And so you hear the model agent Omar Albertto in a herringbone tweed suit say, “I miss energies,” and other participants discuss how they’re pining for their friends and “the normality of being human.” Many designers have adjusted their offerings to this stay-at-home moment. Wolk and Morais have made a specialty of retro tailoring, and they’re standing by it. As they point out, their Spencer jackets, double-breasted waistcoats, and fabulous archival Liberty print shirts (all of fabrics were upcycled or sourced within a 12 mile radius of their studio) could just as easily be worn with jeans as with the oxford bags they styled them with. 

Because they dress young Hollywood, they didn’t neglect evening glam either. There are pajama sets in vintage brocade—the gossip around Los Angeles is that everyone’s wearing pajamas to the Emmys—and a very 1930s silver sequin bias-cut gown. For those of us who don’t have red carpets, virtual or otherwise, in our future, they’re planning on making the same dress in t-shirt jersey.

Source: Vogue

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Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Spring 2021 Menswear

Rei Kawakubo envisaged protecting men with a layer of silver as she was devising her Homme Plus spring collection: “It is my wish that the strength of metal, the strength that wouldn’t yield to any pressure or force, and the strength that will give birth to hope to overcome the various hardships we face, will all overlap in this collection.”

“Metal Outlaw” was the title she came up with. And yes, the silver was a smart choice, reading luminously onscreen in what must have been one of the first seasons in decades that Comme des Garçons has not flown to Paris to show. Over the past couple of years, the imagery of Kawakubo’s shows has often communicated the sense of impending dystopia at the door, the designs manifesting the human reaction to it, flip-flopping between fear and the frantic impulse to dance, seize the day. This wasn’t like that: now that a completely unforeseen enemy has arrived to assail the whole of humanity, Kawakubo chose to resist the darkness and opt for communicating the quest for inner resilience. The clothes didn’t look like armor, retro space suits, or science-lab uniforms—the stock readings that silver will usually trigger. Instead, it was as if Kawakubo wanted to show a spiritual aura being generated from within, radiating from the silvery crinkles and wrinkles embedded in the surfaces of her rakish tailoring.

Surmounting and adapting to the problems of working during isolation, Kawakubo had made a conceptual projection from an interior landscape onto clothes (NB: the incorporation of furniture, kitchen, and other indoor materials into 2020’s lockdown collections will make a Ph.D. study one day). Kawakubo said that it was contemplating the metallic materials she often uses in interiors that started her off. “Said,” that is, in show notes that arrived at the inboxes of members of the international press. The mini show was put on at Comme de Garçons’ Tokyo headquarters in front of 43 members of staff and a handful of local journalists.

Projections of work by the Brazilian artist and photojournalist Alberto Bitar flowed across the white space. Emerging from a cylindrical structure—a dressing room, maybe—the Metal Outlaws were wearing two variations of Comme tailoring themes: skinny-leg suits or baggy-short suits. What were the silver materials? Hard to be definitive, but some were crushed, some apparently foiled and printed, some with the appearance of leather (though Comme is a house that is firmly wedded to synthetics).

Whatever, this compressed collection fully consolidated Homme Plus characteristics as a house that has distinctive, tradition-bending cuts—alternative but not out to place men in the realms of conceptual clothing. If a full silver suit doesn’t appeal, Kawakubo proceeded to break it down into patchworks of suiting, cycling from traditional menswear lightweight wool to a sparky, for-the-kids section of lime, cornflower blue and yellow, and then wrapping up with a couple of dark tuxedos, with the silver reserved to lining the lapels. As a vote for optimism against the odds, it raised a smile.

Source: Vogue

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Libertine Spring 2021 Ready-To-Wear

The connections between new and old, past and present, are the main themes of every Libertine collection, but as the brand turns 20, it seems fair to say that “this time, it’s personal”—or more accurately, more personal than ever.

For spring 2021 Johnson Hartig used silkscreens from Libertine’s infant days; he also revisited the whale and skull-and-crossbones pattern developed for the brand’s 2007 collaboration with Target. This time around it was rendered in crystals, rather than embroidery, and used to “glow up” khakis. What was not visible, but important in terms of process and ideology, is that the designer sewed many pieces on his mother’s 1950s Singer, as he did even before the brand assumed its current name.

“I had always made clothes for myself from vintage things that I found at thrift shops [that] I would take apart and put back together,” says Hartig, “and I wanted to learn to silkscreen on clothing.” At a Christmas party he had at home in Los Angeles, he met Cindy Greene, who was working as a graphic designer for DKNY and performing with the electro-pop band Fischerspooner. She saw what Hartig was doing and proposed a collaboration. In 2001 the Californian headed to New York for a weekend to work with Greene in her DKNY studio where he recalls having to hide in the closet every time one of her colleagues entered. And that’s how the yet-to-be-named project set sail. In 2004 the pair made their New York Fashion Week debut with a collection of silkscreened vintage pieces and participated in the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Greene amicably left the label in 2008.

Over time, the percentage of vintage in the collection shrunk and from scratch grew, but the past is ever a playground for Hartig, an avid collector. For spring 2021 he’s created a Libertine toile print from 18th-century textile fragments, adding surprise elements like a Libertine stamp and skeletons that haunt pastoral landscapes and crumbling edifices. Old stamps are similarly collaged into a print, which in one case was worked up into a lovely bias-cut dress with streamers based on a 1920s frock. Surrealism and trompe l’oeil are also part of the brand DNA. A suit with scissors and pattern-cutting lines is the most direct example. The pieces made up in a print developed from 1920s and 1930s button cards were over embroidered with vintage buttons.

Ghosts From Our Past is the title of the collection, but it is haunted not only by ghosts of the long, distant past. “I also have been thinking about this particular time [and] the nearly 1 million people who’ve died from this virus, about all of these spirits all at once,” the designer states. Hartig’s attention to how we are living now had practical applications: He shifted his attention from dressy evening to more casual everydaywear, like embellished white button-downs and the aforementioned crystallized khakis. Silkscreened cutoff shorts were very now at the same time that they were very “original Libertine,” meaning that they spoke to what Hartig describes as “the tension between preppy and street punk,” which is at the core of the brand.

In place of a show this season, Libertine is presenting a “fantastical” film made by a design associate named Xiaohan Zhao. It’s a trippy tribute to the collection and to the brand ethos. The video, like the collection, is deserving of a best-in-show award ribbon like those that cover a spring 2021 Beale-meets-Bouvier deb dress. In true Libertine fashion, both are “subversive, but also hopeful.” 

Source: Vogue

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