On this Runway, Black Lives Matter

There has been a fair amount of sloganeering at the start of New York Fashion Week; a fair amount of designers wearing their hearts — or their causes — not just on their sleeves, but also on their chests. It’s a trend that started in February 2017, for reasons that are probably obvious to all, and hasn’t really gone away, though the subject matter has expanded far beyond its origin.

So there was Jeremy Scott taking a bow after his pop-protest parade of perforated motocross leathers and zip-me-up-zip-me-down overalls, in a T-shirt that read “Tell Your Senator No on Kavanaugh,” and decorating his sweatshirt minis and army green denims with appliqués touting: “riot,” “peace,” “shock” and “power.”

And here was Christian Siriano, offering up a “Vote for Cynthia” tee on the runway, and then modeling one himself — much to the delight of the candidate (Cynthia Nixon, who is running for governor of New York) sitting in his front row.

The gestures are sincerely meant, though they can read as superficial.

But nowhere was a message as elegantly and thoughtfully conveyed at it was at Pyer Moss, where Kerby Jean-Raymond is quietly carving out a career as the conscience of the fashion community.

He dared to drag his Manhattan-centric audience out to Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood near where he grew up, to the Weeksville Heritage Center, a historic site commemorating one of the first free African-American communities of the 19th century. There, he set his runway outside, just beyond a group of the original white-frame houses in the center’s backyard, where a 40-person gospel choir was arrayed to sing his collection out.

“I had 20 people last season, but this I time I saved a bit and stepped it up,” Mr. Jean-Raymond said. On the fifth anniversary of his label’s founding, indeed he did.

He did it with collaborations: with FUBU, the “For Us, By Us” street wear label that was a favorite of ’90s rappers; and with the artist Derrick Adams, whose exhibition ‘Sanctuary” just ended at the Museum of Arts and Design and whose portraits of his family graced jacquard and organza. He did it with meaning, and sophisticated line.

The idea, Mr. Jean-Raymond said after the show, was to continue his exploration of black American life, but this time to address the “present-day moment of people calling the cops on black men having a barbecue” by exploring what “black American leisure looks like.”

He began with “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 to advise readers on how to navigate the Jim Crow world (and which also inspired Mr. Adams’s work), and went from there.

And he did it without gussying up his points or banging you over the head with them. Instead he picked his angles, refined them; found the grace in the austerity of a long blue tuxedo shirt atop narrow trousers, in the allure in a flapper tank dress covered in 200,000 Swarovski crystals to create a mosaic portrait of a black father holding his baby, and in the harmony of a carnelian silk wrap skirt quilted like a duvet and paired with a T-shirt with the words “Stop calling 911 on the culture” over the breast.

Hemlines were fluid, colors bright and volumes controlled. The men’s wear was wide at the shoulders and cropped at the waist, trousers languid as sweats.

It’s already an achievement to make very good clothes, which Mr. Jean-Raymond does. And you can appreciate them without knowing anything except how they look. But when you add depth beyond the design, the result has real impact.

Mr. Jean-Raymond said he approached each collection as if it was an art project, which is the sort of charge that often gets levied at Eckhaus Latta, another resolutely individual brand having something of a breakthrough.

In this case, it’s mostly because the founders, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, describe their work with words like “conceptual” and “homespun,” and because they put their friends on the runway and because each collection gets accompanied by a prose poem. And because they get invited to do things like have a small installation at the Whitney Museum, as they do now (it runs until Oct. 8). So maybe, fair enough.

There’s no question Brandon Maxwell’s Marfa-inspired ode to the pink and red roses of Texas by way of 1980s glamorama, or Tory Burch’s Americanos-on-the-cruise-ship caftans and scarf separates, would be easier to slip into a closet.

Ditto the collection from Kate Spade New York, on the runway for the first time, where the designer Nicola Glass has wisely moved the house a step further away from the memory of its founder and into 1970s prints and Ali MacGraw attitude.

But like Mr. Jean-Raymond, Eckhaus Latta is getting notably good at balancing a certain clothesiness with a willingness to explore. Mr. Eckhaus and Ms. Latta are fascinated, as well, with the work of the hand in the Arte Povera, as opposed to atelier, sense. But they also have the courage of their own convictions. Or neuroses. Neurotic convictions, maybe.

They make some of the best jeans on the runway (white, straight, hung off the hips and cropped at the ankle, then dip dyed in pastels or splotched with brown like cowhide) and then mix them up with knits defined by negative space, use decomposition as adornment, and reject the notion of gender differentiation.

At Monse the designers Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia also dabbled in unisex clothing, putting their women’s wear, which is mostly about deconstructed men’s wear, on men as well as women. Though not the dresses or even the skirt shorts, which somewhat undermined the point of the whole exercise.

In any case, there was also a live performance at Eckhaus Latta, as at Pyer Moss — something of a trend these days, like the message tees.

Except the Eckhaus performers were small children who had been invited to sit on a mat and bang on upside-down plastic buckets, among other percussive opportunities, which was funny and also slyly subversive, like a lot of the clothes. In the middle of the whole thing one little boy took his plastic bucket, inverted it and put it on his head.

In the escalating cacophony of fashion week, you kind of knew how he felt.