New York Fashion Week dribbled into existence just after President Trump’s impeachment acquittal victory lap, and in the shadow of the Bernie-Buttigieg squabbles over Iowa. Not to mention the Oscars.
It was not the optimum moment for the first fashion week of the third decade of the new century to start. It was too easy to consider the early shows, largely absent any globally recognized names, and think, “Who cares?” Easy, really, to look away.
So it was a good thing that one of those designers decided to seize the moment and make a convincing case for why that’s the wrong conclusion to draw.
Rachel Comey didn’t mean to be a spokeswoman for her industry. (She has always been pretty committed to doing her own thing, whatever the vicissitudes of fashion.) She wanted to support a cause, but it was women’s reproductive rights, not the existential crisis of American fashion. It just so happened that in doing the one, she provided a panacea for the other.
This season, as she has done occasionally in the past, she eschewed a formal show for a sort of dinner theater with clothes. She invited a group of friends, customers and hipster celebrities (for Ms. Comey they tend to be the same thing), plus a few fashion critics, to La Mercerie, a French cafe in SoHo, for an evening whose M.C. was Casey Legler, the restaurant’s manager, former Olympic swimmer and sometime men’s wear model.
In between the salad and seafood and chocolate mousse, the cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond would get up from a table to croon, and models of all ages would sidle between the seats, dressed in Ms. Comey’s collection. Some guests got up to speak, including Lourdes Rivera, the senior vice president for U.S. Programs at the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Aminatou Sow, the podcast host.
Almost every speaker, whatever else they were discussing, also had a “Rachel Comey origin story” to tell: a moment when they realized that they felt, somehow, more themselves because of what they were wearing, which happened to be Ms. Comey’s clothing.
It began with Ms. Legler, who talked about her wife, Siri May, an advocacy adviser for the Center for Reproductive Rights, and how when she goes to speak at the United Nations on behalf of her organization and tells harrowing stories of women in extremis, she wears Ms. Comey’s clothes because they make her feel both powerful and feminine.
Leanne Shapton, the artist and writer, was wearing a black jacket, sliced up the arms so that they fell away from the body as she spoke, suggesting both protection and freedom. She wears it whenever she travels, she said, and people in the airline security line always ask her where she got it.
The last speaker was Molly Ringwald, who said that everything she was wearing was Rachel Comey and that she had actually bought it all (which in the current symbiotic marketing of Hollywood and fashion is practically unheard-of). By the time she was done and the last model had appeared, you kind of knew what all the fuss was about.
Ms. Comey’s clothes defy easy categorization. They check many boxes but fit neatly into almost none. For example, this collection included a thick cowl-backed camel tunic finished in a fringe of silver feathers at the thigh; wide, high-waist nubby tweed Katharine Hepburn trousers with a shell pink silk jacket tucked inside; and a woven burnished gold coat with two big black patch pockets and a high ruff of curly sheepskin hugging the chin.
These clothes do what fashion should do, which is frame the complexities of the wearer with grace but without oversimplification, so the person becomes more of who they are. The clothes don’t have an agenda of their own, but they facilitate the agenda of the woman who wears them.
That’s harder than it sounds. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of costuming going on.
The current boy wonder of the New York fashion world, Christopher John Rogers, winner of the most recent Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund, was having a 1950s couture-meets-C.Z. Guest-meets-Rita-Hayworth-by-way-of-the-fruit-bowl vision, in iridescent taffeta, plush velvet, silk shantung and Swarovski crystal, with balloon sleeves, blossoming “strawberry” skirts and football shoulders — all in shades of orange, lemon, grape and cherry.
Mr. Rogers can drape and pouf with great skill and exuberance, but there’s no tension in his clothes, no sense of past fantasy confronting present reality.
This is also the case with Brandon Maxwell, who has been progressively smoothing out his more interesting edges (he began his career as Lady Gaga’s stylist), smothering them in deep-pile cashmere knits, perfectly tailored high-waist flares, plush peacoats and sweeping shirtdresses that felt like an audition to be the next Ralph Lauren.
Once upon a time, this kind of plush East Egg sportswear contained in it the promise of a more sparkling life, but now it, and all it represents, feels mostly passé.
At least at Rag & Bone, Marcus Wainwright took his usual British-classics-meets-American-work-wear schtick and grew it up a little, so the houndstooth and leathers, the glam anoraks and throwaway tweeds, looked like the sort of thing you would wear in a post-apocalyptic C-suite, as opposed to a post-apocalyptic skate park.
And at Tory Burch, the push-pull between floaty prairie frocks in organza and Chantilly lace and sharp new Romantic velvet jackets and jodhpurs — inspired by the push-pull of the ceramic artist Francesca DiMattio’s morphing, multitextured sculptures — added a bit of oomph to an otherwise straightforward story of silhouettes and sensibility.
The past may inform the present, but it shouldn’t be a retreat. (That gets us nowhere except stuck.) It needs to be chopped up, picked apart, mined for information and then reshaped, literally, for relevance.
The troika of designers at Vaquera — Patric DiCaprio, Claire Sullivan and Bryn Taubensee — get that. They set their very short (only 18 looks) guerrilla show in Dover Street Market, where the store aisles were runways (viewers were crammed in on every side), and each model walked with a number, as in the department store fashion shows of old.
Then the designers played with essentially three elements — cabaret sequins; maroon and cream striped governess shirting; and camo — mixing and matching them in the tropes of historical grandeur and red-light districts. A cropped sequined black moto jacket/bolero with leg-of-mutton sleeves came matched with an olive drab corset atop a camo ruffled skirt. A camo baby-doll gown bubbled at the hem and ruched at the sleeves dipped low in front to reveal a lace bra and flounced out over skinny black leggings hemmed in silk-satin frills. Even the tuxedo G-string bottom wasn’t just a joke but part of the story.
Instead of show notes, Mr. DiCaprio and company created an elaborate script set in the year 2030 involving Liza Minnelli, a bar in a swamp and a flashback to impoverished designers in New York.
Whether lack of funds was in truth the reason for the show site and the brevity, the result was the most coherent, sophisticated work they’ve done. Who needs movie magic when you’ve got real characters like these?
