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The Top 10 Moments of New York Fashion Week
Calvin Klein packed his front row full of celebrities, and Ralph Lauren brought everyone to Bedford Hills, N.Y. The fashion editors and reporters of Styles and T round up the highlights of the week.
Tom Ford Started the Week With a Bang
As many designers opted to show in Paris this season, one very important American designer, Tom Ford, did just the opposite: he returned to New York after seasons of jumping all over the map (to London, Los Angeles — and seemingly everywhere in between). Opening New York Fashion Week last Wednesday evening, the designer transformed the Park Avenue Armory into a slick lounge, complete with moody lavender lighting. The show was just as seductive, with crystal-embellished panties, power-shoulder suiting and gauzy bandage evening dresses. After the show ended, the site transformed into an after-party complete with shirtless waiters and Off White’s Virgil Abloh in the D.J. booth. Only a showman like Mr. Ford could inject this much sex and excitement into one evening. — MALINA JOSEPH GILCHRIST, T magazine style director, Women’s
Calvin Klein Had a Mind-Boggling Front Row
Raf Simons, the chief creative officer of Calvin Klein, has set out to reflect his vision of the American experience in his clothes. But even before a survivalist tea dress or logo quilt appeared on the runway, his ambition was clear from his front row: as diverse a mix of talent, ages and identities as appeared anywhere else all week. There were so many assorted boldface names, they couldn’t even fit on one bench. The “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah sat next to a very hirsute Jake Gyllenhaal, who sat next to the “Moonlight” star Mahershala Ali, who sat next to Lupita Nyong’o, who sat a few seats down from the artist Sterling Ruby, who sat across from the former Klein icon Brooke Shields, who was next to the rising star and tween Millie Bobby Brown, who was next to the It girl Paris Jackson. And we haven’t even gotten to where Christina Ricci, Kate Bosworth, Kelela, Rashida Jones and Russell Westbrook were. It was enough to bring out the groupie in us all. — VANESSA FRIEDMAN, fashion director, Styles
A Few Designers Opted for Classic Sites
As some American designers, including Thom Browne and Joseph Altuzarra, decamped for Paris, others doubled down on New York and showed in some of the city’s most iconic sites. The Row’s Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen staged their show over scones and coffee at the Carlyle; Derek Lam and Gabriela Hearst took over the newly renovated the Pool, in the former Four Seasons space; Brandon Maxwell brought guests to Doubles, the subterranean members-only club at the Sherry Netherland; and Oscar de la Renta overtook Sotheby’s (using the escalators as an extended runway). Perhaps most notable of all was Carolina Herrera, who staged her show in the garden at MoMA — the first time a full-fledged fashion show had been held there. — ISABEL WILKINSON, digital director, T magazine
Casting Was Surprising — and Beautiful
By the second day of fashion week, Gigi and Bella Hadid began to feel like old friends: The sisters, along with a handful of other Instagram-savvy models, are so ubiquitous on runways that they become almost impossible to avoid. No knock against them, but it’s for this reason that when designers cast unexpected models — artists, singers, friends — it’s something of a relief. At Helmut Lang, Shayne Oliver mixed some of Lang’s original muses, like the model Kirsten Owen, with people he had found on the street. Eckhaus Latta cast the pregnant artist Maia Ruth Lee, among other friends, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh mixed models with the actress Hailey Benton Gates and the artist India Menuez.
Best of all was Abraham Boyd, a Detroit-born singer spotted by the director Spike Jonze a year and a half ago, singing in Central Park. Mr. Jonze cast him for Opening Ceremony’s dance-performance show, in which he sang a poignant rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Frankie Valli. — I.W.
Ralph Lauren Brought Everyone on a Car-Themed Adventure
In one of the most personal displays of New York Fashion Week, Ralph Lauren arranged for about 250 guests to be chauffeured from the city to Bedford Hills, N.Y., to view his see-now-buy-now collection — and his famous stable of cars, which include some of the rarest models in the world. In celebration of 50 years in business, the show took place in the garage where Mr. Lauren stores his automobiles, and guests were able to inspect vintage Jaguars, McLarens and Alfa Romeos, among others, over Champagne and hors d’oeuvres before sitting down to a runway positioned among the designer’s beautiful machines.
To an espionage-themed soundtrack borrowed from the 1965 James Bond film, “Thunderball,” male and female models walked in clothing inspired by the cars: silvery Prince of Wales check suits for women, Ferrari-red ballgowns, and fringed tuxedos as deep black as the designer’s 1938 Bugatti, one of the most expensive cars on the planet. After, the crowd of magazine editors and actors including Diane Keaton, Jessica Chastain and Armie Hammer were ushered to yet another level of the garage, where a sit-down dinner of lobster and burgers from the brand’s restaurant, the Polo Bar, were doled out by an army of synchronized — and, of course, classically good-looking — waiters. — ALEXA BRAZILIAN, fashion features director, T magazine
Vaquera Reminded Us That Young Talent Still Thrives Here
The vacuum left by designers departing the New York schedule made space for some of the younger brands on the margins to rush in and fill the void. Truth is, there are still scrawny, fledgling labels operating on a shoestring with more gusto than business plan, and they still make New York Fashion Week their home.
Vaquera, a four-person collective dedicated to hysterical oddity, is one, both shaky in its early days and squarely in the spotlight’s glare. A year ago, they barely had the means to produce their collection. Even now, Bryn Taubensee, Patric DiCaprio, David Moses and Claire Sully said backstage before the show, many of their pieces come in only a single size — designer price tag notwithstanding — but they were just nominated for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, and were juggling curious interviewers from The New York Times and Vogue.
“We feel like we’re in the middle of an identity crisis,” Ms. Sully said. “We want to communicate our work through our crazy shows but also through selling things and trying to figure out how to do that.”
Rather than ape polish and assurance, they leaned into the confusion, and their show had a cheeky verve their more established colleagues could only wish for. It was a thrilling chance to see designers working to figure themselves out in real time, with a gonzo sense of proportion and shape and great bits of art-as-fashion: a hand-drawn Abraham Lincoln T-shirt dress, an oversize bathrobe-gown. As Whoopi Goldberg, who reviewed the show for Interview Magazine (!), wrote: “If I were hosting another Oscars show I would wear the terry cloth. Absolutely. I just think it’s beautiful.” Reason enough to hope for a reprise. — MATTHEW SCHNEIER, reporter, Styles
1997 Turned Out to Be a Banner Year
Who knew 1997 would turn out to be so pivotal for fashion? That’s the year no less than three — count ’em — New York designers founded their businesses, and they all celebrated their 20th anniversaries this season: Narciso Rodriguez, Jeremy Scott and Maria Cornejo. Though they have notably different aesthetics ranging from the streamlined (Mr. Rodriguez) to the organically sculptural (Ms. Cornejo), they share the same independent spirit and cleareyed sense of sartorial self. Their longevity can be attributed to the strength of these visions as well as the healthy perspective that comes from the responsibility of running your own business. I don’t know what they were putting in the water back in ’97, but fashion should bottle it. — V.F.
There Was Time for the Weird, and the People Who Love It
Eckhaus Latta’s show was packed, not only with critics and the editors of major magazines — more than usual, it seemed to me — but also with genuine friends and fans. The brand, which is designed by Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, who met at Rhode Island School of Design, has been on the rise these past few seasons, in part because it presents an increasingly fleshed-out vision, both of clothes and community.
You believed that these people would wear these clothes, both those who milled around after the show eating dumplings and sipping weed-leaf cocktails and those who had featured in it: among them, the singer Kelela, the artist Lucy Chadwick, young Coco Gordon Moore (Sonic Youth scion of Kim and Thurston) and Susan Cianciolo, whose art-house fashion shows for her Run line in the 1990s were in some way the progenitors of Eckhaus Latta’s. That makes a kind of thread, one that connects Eckhaus Latta to its community, to the past and to the future — pull it, and it can take you to interesting places.
After the show, I piled into a car with Ms. Cianciolo’s gallerist, Bridget Donahue, herself a sometime Eckhaus Latta model, to head to her gallery, where the Lou Dallas show was set to begin. (Next up at the gallery: an exhibition by Ms. Cianciolo.) Lou Dallas is designed by Raffaella Hanley, whose practice also is closer to art than to commercial fashion: her pieces, most of them of recycled or dead-stock fabrics, are all hand-embroidered, hand-embellished and, at the end, often hand-sewn on the models. If New York Fashion Week is destined to be tarred with the “commercial” brush, it was cheering to remember that there are plenty of others making things devoutly weird, small and hand-crafted. Really, they always have. — M.S.
Prabal Gurung Brought Gloria Steinem (and Fine Jewelry) to Fashion Week
There were plenty of good moments at the Prabal Gurung show. Unlike many of the front rows this season, which feature up-and-coming actresses, Mr. Gurung’s featured Huma Abedin and Gloria Steinem — the first time Ms. Steinem had ever been to a fashion show. The casting, too, was notable: Gigi and Bella Hadid walked alongside Ashley Graham and Andreja Pejic. But despite all this excitement, it was hard for me to take my eyes off of Mr. Gurung’s debut collection with Tasaki, the Japanese fine jeweler, where he was recently been named global creative director. His pieces, including twisting, architectural earrings (in white gold and pearl) inspired by Surrealism, were the perfect accompaniment to the stunning evening dresses. — M.J.G.
Marc Jacobs Ended the Week With the Sound of Silence
The Marc Jacobs show has always been a loud punctuation mark to New York Fashion Week, but this season, as with his last, was shown in complete silence. It was staged at the expansive, high-ceilinged Park Avenue Armory uptown, and there was no elaborate set, no fancy lighting and no music. All one could hear was the sound of the wildly eclectic clothes — some ornately beaded, others heavy with shimmery scales of sequins — swishing as models walked on the old wood floors. There were turbans pinned with jeweled brooches with almost every look, lots of swirling ’60s-style printed column dresses with black opera gloves, and embellishment in all shapes, colors and forms, including metallic colored tinsel on sandals and sparkly boas. Seating was arranged on metal folding chairs on the perimeter of the wide open space, which made guests on the other side of the room seem tiny and the models, who carried weekend totes and wore fanny packs, look as if they were in transit, roaming a giant old European train station en route to somewhere exotic and very, very far away. — A.B.
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