New York Fashion Week is here to help you get dressed
No matter which tribe you belong to. The show spectrum ran from molten dipped supermodels to Australian designer Dion Lee’s latest workwear riff - toolkit and all.
Fashion month is back. The Big Apple kicked off proceedings with shows that captured the energy of the city that never sleeps.
In a city as diverse as New York this will always mean different things to different people. This includes the preppy Uptown polish of Ralph Lauren, which made a welcome, and star-studded, return to the New York Fashion Week schedule after four years away. Diane Keaton, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Lopez and Amanda Seyfried were all perched front row, while supermodel Christy Turlington was the ultimate showstopper, closing the show in a lamé gold one-shouldered gown.
The glamorous gold appeared in several other iterations in the collection, including, fittingly, a polo shirt. The collection also played with that most American of fabrics, denim, with Lauren splicing denim with tulle and embroidering it with appliqué, crystal beads and feathers.
So far, so Ralph.
Other designers toying with their own design codes included Australian designer Dion Lee who pushed forward his idea of utilitarian dressing with a collection that riffed on ideas of a toolkit and workwear.
“This season was primarily about evolving the utility and construction language I’ve been playing with until now,” Lee said in a preview ahead of the show.
Lee also told Vogue Australia’s Jonah Waterhouse after the show that New York remained a constant source of inspiration for him.
“Designers are always inspired by what’s around them, and I think moving to New York was about immersing myself in more experiences and evolving as a designer,” he said. “This is the city for that.”
These ideas were represented both literally and figuratively with wrenches applied to a boned and structured bodice and the thigh high boots with integrated tool belts. Elsewhere ideas of workwear were shown in oversized overalls worn undone and grey boiler suits. Lingerie-inspired looks, bubble skirt hemlines and Lee’s signature corsetry added a certain playfulness and kink to the line-up, as did an expansion of Lee’s typically muted colour palette with splices of red.
Other highlights included the likes of the ever reliable Proenza Schouler, which expanded on its previous season of beautifully wearable clothes — clean line tailoring and easy trousers with interesting details such as mesh dresses made with ribbon and sheer separates with embroidery. Cate Holstein’s Khaite brand is another constant when it comes to making chic clothes for women who mean business. This season she added an edge of toughness with motorcycle leather jackets and sheer body-con dresses alongside her diaphanous blouses and sharp suiting.
It was a season for big debuts too, with Peter Do, an American designer who worked under Phoebe Philo when she was at Celine, showing his first collection for the storied Helmut Lang brand. It is big shoes to fill. Lang (who departed his label in 2005) designed clothes that remain a constant reference source for other designers, all drawn to his minimalism with a subversive edge. Do’s first collection was faithful to Lang’s design codes, the flat front trousers and straight tailoring, the ‘ordinary’ T-Shirts with writing on them (courtesy of Do’s friend, the poet Ocean Vuong), the seatbelt straps. Seeing how he will push these references along with his own take on tailoring and silhouette will be interesting to see unfold.
Meanwhile, in all the flurry of excitement for big debuts and anticipated returns, it can be easy to forget the value of designers with tenure such as Stuart Vevers who celebrated ten years with Coach this season. Vevers didn’t stage a retrospective, but showed his clear view on Coach. This included cool oversized leather separates (made with upcycled leather) little slips and cobwebbed mesh dresses in black and lavender.
For Vevers it was a distillation of his own little patch of New York. As he said ahead of the show, “I wanted to capture New York archetypes — my New York archetypes — but rather than look at vintage images of that time I wanted to remember it in my own way.”
