Shown in London, men's designer Angus Chiang looked fondly to his schoolyard days, altering boyhood attire and school uniforms to fit the playful pop-rave soundtrack of 90s Taiwan.
True to form, Gareth Pugh presented his anime-eyed, all-black (almost) fall collection in London today, a dire warning of dark days ahead...
After a bit of criticism regarding diversity on his runway, Marc Jacobs responded the best way he knows how, by going to the other extreme. At his show today, roughly half the models fell somewhere on the darker-skinned spectrum — never a bad idea, particularly as the main theme here seemed to be 70s Harlem at the turn of 80s hip-hop.
Another season, another head-scratcher from Thom Browne, who's emerging as New York's foremost conceptualist. Again he borrowed from the traditional men's wardrobe — he's mostly a men's designer, so he's allowed — to craft imaginative penguin suits and clever riffs on formality that eventually exploded into bright crayon-colored pastoral scenes. The dog bag from last season is back, and this he has a buddy, a penguin...
The idea of in-flight slumber — or lack thereof — informed Laurence & Chico's fall collection, designed by husbands Laurence Li and Chico Wang...
With shredded Stars and Stripes streaming from the ceiling (set design by artist Ruby Sterling) and David Bowie's This Is Not America blaring, the political stance of Raf Simons was made perfectly clear at his Calvin Klein debut. As it turned out, the thrilling premiere of his post-Dior era also happens to coincide with a very precarious moment for American democracy.
For the second time, and for the foreseeable future, Kenzo showed both their menswear and womenswear collections at the same time. It made for an epic 88-look show, with clipped audio from Obama's climate change speeches. It was only natural that New Yorkers Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, Kenzo’s creative directors since 2011, would have the controversial presidential election on their minds. Trump’s inauguration took place the day before the show, and immediately all references to climate change were removed from the official White House website.
As Thom Browne's dark-lipsticked models walked down his Paris runway with the speed of a vacationing snail — in bodysuits astonishingly pieced together with more a thousand buttons, then in flat panels of those same suits held together by around 800 buttons, then in their more normal versions with just 600 buttons — one was left with plenty of time to ponder this ending to fashion week, and menswear in general.
A hyperrealist mosh-pit painting by New York street artist Dan Witz was featured on Dior Homme's invitation. It depicts sweaty fans writhing at hardcore music gigs. He claimed, in an interview with The Creators Project last March, that “the greatest single influence on my painting … comes from the music I’ve grown up with. The artists I most admire have almost always been musicians, and most of my best ideas come from the transgressive energy.”
