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Julia Fox, Eric Adams and the Return of the Suit

It’s been a while since a New York Fashion Week show was an hour late and almost no one cared.

A while since that sort of anarchic creative energy — the kind that once defined the space known as “downtown,” where people climbed rickety tenement stairs on the Lower East Side to see Miguel Adrover make a dress out of Quentin Crisp’s old mattress and upend the status quo — was enough to hold a room.

That’s not just because Covid-19 put everything into a deep freeze for two years, but because a certain polite, well-behaved-ness had become a defining characteristic of New York fashion — an anesthetizing aesthetic that prized pretty over risk, palatable over explosive. There has been the occasional screamingly ambitious exception, like Telfar’s 2019 mosh pit and Kerby Jean-Raymond’s Kings Theater throwdown, but mostly, while the trains ran on time, they didn’t go very far.

Which is why it was notable, late one Friday night as fashion month began, that a crowd of people in towering platforms and bulky sweats and peekaboo somethings stood (stood!) waiting in the Shed, the theater in Hudson Yards, in a room bifurcated by metal scaffolding and a walkway, bouncing from toe to toe for more than an hour, waiting for the Shayne Oliver show to start.

Waiting, really, for the next stage of New York fashion to begin.

After all, if anyone was going to blow it all up, it would be Mr. Oliver, whose former label, Hood by Air, was an unapologetic romp through the fields of transgression. He stepped out of fashion in 2017, but now he was back — not with a normal runway show but with a three-day art-music-clothing extravaganza called “Headless,” which happened to involve the debut of his namesake line and a plan to disrupt the system.

Did he?

Not entirely. He crossbred silvery Swarovski crystals and spiky-shouldered black jackets, micro shorts and wader-size boots with elongated bird of prey toes, horny headgear and shredded satin gowns. There were a lot of straps and a lot of skin. Models (men and women) had many piercings and carried white roses. One wore a sparkly Telfar bag like a breastplate; another had goggles. Some came wrapped in what looked like paper. At the end, Eartheater, the industrial pop musician otherwise known as Alexandra Drewchin, appeared in a long shredded white dress like some sort of inter-dimensional demon bride wailing into a microphone.

Half of the time neither the audience nor the people in the show seemed to have any idea what was going on or where they were supposed to be walking. It didn’t necessarily matter; the point was less the actual garments than the energy they generated. At least they were on the move. At least they were going somewhere, and not just in circles.

At this point, that sense of momentum may be what we need.

Onward!

What sticks these days, when attention spans are short and competition high (and not just at the Olympics)?

Definitely the appearance of Julia Fox as the opener of the LaQuan Smith show, fresh from her breakup with Kanye West, in the ultimate revenge dress: a slinky black turtleneck tube with a troika of large cutouts around the chest, an artfully placed T-shaped strip of fabric drawing the eye in all sorts of suggestive directions; a pretty good example of the practical application of what may seem the most impractical fashion.

The runway return of barrier-breaking Black models Beverly Johnson and Veronica Webb in Sergio Hudson’s hoot of an ersatz 1980s fashion show in giant giraffe prints and Palm Beach power suits. The front-row appearance of Mayor Eric Adams at Michael Kors’s celebration of New York at night via clutch coats, leotard-like dresses with curvy cutouts at the side and sharp double-breasted suiting with double-facing and crystal.

But also some clothes.

The organic preserved-rosebud top and skirt of Olivia Cheng at Dauphinette, for example, and her upcycled black coat with gleaming pearl buttons spelling out “New York.” The rhinestone-speckled showgirl denim of Area. The pet-me puppy print and pieced-together Frankenstein knits of Puppets & Puppets.

The reinvention of the mermaid dress, courtesy of Joseph Altuzarra, capping off a gorgeous amalgamation of urban sailors and mermaids in long pleated leather kilts and sheepskin-collar navy wool coats; watercolory orange and burgundy prints and fish-scale knit sheaths, all of it accessorized by treasure-chest coins and cowrie shells. At the end, two gowns made entirely of giant gold and bronze sequins rustled by, the rustling paillettes announcing their presence long before they arrived.

As an entrance-making idea (a dress with its own built-in soundtrack!), it was matched only by Peter Do’s reinvention of the suit in black, white, beige and gray, the colors left monochrome or juxtaposed one against another in crescents of contrast.

Sleeves were spliced open at the seams to create fluted arms; cropped bolero-like shrugs came in ribbed knits with extra long arms atop tuxedo shirts; trousers swirled around the calves; and evening wear was simply a false front of halter-like lapels, stretching to the floor. Caught by the thinnest of black leather cords at the waist, they bared the back and arms, framed by greatcoats dropped off the shoulders and draped at the elbows like an opera stole.

The result wasn’t a tux, it wasn’t a gown — it was something else.

Farewell to All That

But the uptown good taste that was synonymous with a certain kind of New York designer seems increasingly irrelevant; a relic of a less crisis-ridden era. That’s why Brandon Maxwell’s emotional ode to his grandmother, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, seemed like such an on-point metaphor. A goodbye not just to a person, but to all that in black and white, cable knit and crushed silk, cinched waists and midcentury silhouettes.

It’s why Jason Wu’s stripped-down romance, with bows and faded botanicals on sporty dance dresses and Bermuda shorts suits, seemed stifled by their ladylike propriety, and Wes Gordon’s rainbow-bright parade of full-skirted entrance gowns, tulle-topiary cocktail frocks and floral sheaths at Carolina Herrera looked lost without the safe space of a gala.

It’s why Gabriela Hearst’s subtle boundary crossing, which splices sophistication (leather trench coats, swishy suiting) and what used to be dismissed as “handicraft” — macramé dresses, chunky knits, healing crystal adornment — doesn’t register as powerfully as perhaps it should.

And it’s why the coolly elegant, modernization of the corset and the crinoline at Proenza Schouler, where dresses and suits were built in three color-blocked parts — tops, waist, bottom — so that narrow torsos bloomed into draped balloon skirts, coats and jackets came with their own knit “belt,” and trouser waists were rolled down to create a peplum at the hip, seemed ultimately too safe.

As it happens, a short story by Ottessa Moshfegh (a writer who has turned into an unexpected fashion muse) titled “Where Will We Go Next?” was handed out at the show. It was a nice idea, though it also served, unfortunately, to illuminate the fact that the collection didn’t really have an answer.

So What Next?

For that, look to Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, of Eckhaus Latta, celebrating their 10th year in business.

They held their show in the old Essex Market, an indoor warren of old refrigerated shelving and countertops that once served as the heart of the Lower East Side neighborhood and is now scheduled for demolition to make way for a high rise. Inside, ceilings were leaking electric cables and the tile floors were cracked, but the mood was celebratory, permeated with a sense of community past, but also present.

That has always been the through line of their work, from the casting of friends and family in all shapes and sizes to the clothes, which have a singular crafty intelligence that avoids easy categorization: subversive without being aggressive and intensely tactile.

Nude sequins covered sheer skirts and dresses like glimmering fish scales; denim was either shredded into silken fringe or darned with crocheted mohair; and amoeba-shaped chain mail was pieced together into a slip dress. Layers were used to reveal chunks of flesh in unexpected places, like the inner thigh and just below the buttocks. The colors were foil, oxblood, chocolate and toad. It ended with a guy in a little black dress, zipped up the back.

The effect was of a giant potluck that might turn into a key party. The subject was destruction and resurrection at the same time. A decade ago that made Eckhaus Latta outsiders (where was the pretty?), but now it makes them visionaries.

“The future is people walking down the street laughing,” went the prose poem handed out at the show, along with a magazine filled with Eckhaus Latta memories and associations from people who wear the brand; for whom it is embedded in their lives.

In the moment, it seemed entirely possible they were right.

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