ALEXANDER FURY
I have spent most of the past few days trying to snap interminably perambulating objects (clothes) on models at the New York Fashion Week Spring 2016 showcase, which ends on Friday.
It’s mostly aide memoir – that crocodile coat you may forget among the creased linens of Joseph Altuzarra, the booty-call ensemble of oversized trench over satin nightgown at Alexander Wang.
I’ve had trouble getting anything into focus. It feels like a metaphor for a New York fashion week that, despite a surfeit of shows, and the major new player of Riccardo Tisci’s Givenchy, has resolutely failed to snap into 20:20.
There’s a sensibility of sex, limp camisole dresses and roll-in-the-hay creases. The colour palette has been fleshy, too.
And there have been a few grandiose back-slapping statements to celebrate milestones; Tisci’s 10 years, and Wang’s first decade.
Both wound up going back to what they know – Givenchy in a literal sense, Wang metaphorically.
He staged his show in his traditional Pier 94 venue, against a video screen, with an audience thronged with celebrities, closing it with a massive party.
And the clothes were riffs on the everyday, on the stuff Wang does well, which is to forgo high concept, and high fashion, and just offer clothes. This collection felt recycled. So did Tisci’s Givenchy anniversary.
Credit where its due: Wang’s collection wasn’t difficult to get, and won’t be difficult to wear.
It felt like you saw everything but the kitchen sink – although a toilet-tank chain did double duty as earrings, or trussed around spherical handbags. Maybe it’s back to sex again? Or at least desire, which is what emanated from bags with hardware clanging above the thumping music.
Desire brings us, inevitably, to Victoria Beckham. Because her work is all about that. “I’m like a sponge,” she earnestly stated to me. Meaning she soaks stuff up.
When you wring her out, the juices of various different sources have mingled together to make a cocktail at once familiar, but different, just like Wang’s.
It has its benefits and its drawbacks – sometimes it leaves a taste of other designers’ work in your mouth – but Beckham herself seemed more relaxed about the whole thing this time around.
She’s on her 15th collection – she isn’t celebrating the milestone, but she did mention it pre-show – so perhaps she feels she has nothing left to prove?
“Carefree” was the word she used a few times to describe her collection, as well as “liberated”. There was plenty of colour, and print, neither of which you readily associate with her clothing, or herself.
Beckham was in all-black when we met but, she insists, she’d wear this collection, dedicated to urban surfers with hefty lugalong sacks shaped like decapitated boogie boards.
In part, Beckham’s sponging came from travels across the world, realising that the climate and attitude in places like Miami demanded different things of designers. They elicit different desires.
Sounds obvious, but plenty of designers miss that.
Beckham is canny – she not only tries on all the clothes, but she lives her customers’ lifestyle too. At least, the customers buying lots of clothes from her.
The Independent