The Look: Distorted Reality Version

3rd Nov 2021


"The yin and yang of re-entry is being wrestled with in real-time on the runways."

The thick white fog spread over the square of the Museum of Modern Art on a beautiful sunny day like a cotton batting, blurring the view, making it difficult to see what was to follow. It was Rick Owens’ show, but the darkening of reality seemed terribly familiar.

Symbolism proliferates at fashion week: Dior chess mannequins; Saint Laurent’s wet podium and the final downpour. Some choices generate more puzzles than others; some seem more relevant. Owens’ “Fogachine” was a doozy.

For all the talk about sex! and party ! being the way forward, the general vibe at the water fountain or along the trail is ambivalent: are we really that happy to be back – at the office, at a show – doing the same old, the same old? Is this what we want? And if not (because: no, not quite, or at least not exactly yes), what is it?

Back to school yin and yang are struggling in real time on the catwalks. It’s a more nuanced and complicated way of reflecting what’s going on than just shortening skirts and showing off a bra top or the silly 50s housewife lingerie looks Rokh, and it produces a lot of clothes. more interesting.

“I passed the lockdown in a position of fierce defiance,” said Owens, whose previous pandemic shows, staged on empty beaches in Venice, were effective beauty cries in the void. “And it seemed a little silly now to go back over it and get all sensitive. But we have to be a little responsible, don’t we? So I try to be both.

Hence the duality of the collection, which turned from the grandiose and aggressive shoulders that it made its own to the kind of graceful slanting drape that evoked Greek statuary and old Hollywood; from the protruding insectoid angles of leather appendages to the ovoid curves of a ribbed silk sweatshirt; and army platform boots cut to evoke surgical pins to layers of spider web knits, provocatively speckled with holes like little gaping mouths just waiting for something to grab onto.

So two women, all in black, were perched on the roof of the museum and, like bewitching flower girls, scattered dried jasmine petals from Owens’ garden in Venice on the show in remembrance of the past year. And hence the fog, with its layers of associations – mystery, nature, ritual, disco! – belched by an assortment of small black machines from Germany.

They weren’t just a feat, however. Owens is working with the manufacturer and will sell the misters in three sizes (wearable for the wrist and ankle, plus a coffee table option) as part of their collection. You can also have your fog and take it with you.

They are probably going to sell.

Raf Simons, meanwhile, blurred all lines between suits and t-shirts; treating the gray and black clothes ready for Wall Street as group products and splashing them with screen-printed logos invented for different groups – goth, metal, techno – in an inversion that was as much about the increasingly cliched nature of streetwear as it was more plus confused discussion of office dress code and who can tell what “appropriate” clothing means.

To this end, he also erased, like many designers, the difference between men’s and women’s clothing, so that all models of any gender wore the same skirts or shirts or sweaters or oversized shirts. giant. The buttons were complete with old-fashioned cursive script labels, placed conspicuously at the base of the neck or wrist, and small, skeletal metal hand-bracelets (first introduced last season) gripping the biceps, like a phantasmagoric sign of old ideas around work and the future finally ending.

All of this made Gabriela Hearst’s Chloe show – staged on the banks of the Seine and its first with an audience since being appointed a designer late last year – rare in its sunny clarity. Hearst is one of the few designers who still speak openly about sustainability, and Chloe is in the process of being B Corp certified (with verified social and environmental accomplishments); the designer also said she was determined to use the brand as a platform to elevate handwork.

As a result, she focuses less on silhouette or shape and more on texture (“I’m trying to make texture a brand signature,” she said during a preview), which means lots of blouses and kaftans, drop waist dresses and loose linen suits. . Also a new tag, Chloé Craft, signaling the type of clothing, such as a dress covered in hand-tied silk streamers or made up of multi-colored scallops mosaic with macrame, which look deceptively simple. but are impossible to achieve by machine.

They weren’t flashy, but they were valuable and were a low-key reminder – like Owens ‘Fog and Simons’ switcheroos – of the distortion of our world.

For anyone who doesn’t see it, just consider Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe, where classicism and establishment expectations have been subverted, stretched on both sides, and otherwise punctured. Literally.

Long columns of jersey were pulled over wireframe structures, creating geometric disturbances in the line and hugging the body in a new, pointed shape. Hammered gold breastplates were encrusted on dip-dyed ribbed cotton and back-to-front trench dresses, then crushed in asymmetry, listing on one side. Heraldic chiffon draped pants in faded denim blue. The sequined slip dresses had a cancan dancer’s frill that framed not a slit but a real hole in the garment, as if the wearer’s leg had torn.

It was both exuberant and uncomfortable. “Neurotic, psychedelic, completely hysterical,” that’s how Anderson put it in his performance notes. Well, duh. Welcome to now.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.