Gwyneth Paltrow Takes New York Fashion Week
It’s easy to feel during Fashion Week in New York — but not in Paris, Milan, or London — that it really is a fast-fashion world. On Sunday, Cos, the more minimalist unit of H&M, put on a show in Brooklyn. An hour before, Gwyneth Paltrow, standing with perfect posture in a sleeveless gray dress, greeted editors who came to see Gwyn, her rebranded line of lifestyle basics. Paltrow wanted to call her clothing line Goop, naturally, but apparently there was a potential trademark clash with Joop, the German fashion brand. The actress/entrepreneur was less certain about how to quantify Gwyn’s price point, which is from roughly $300 to $2,000, for dark pullovers, slim skirts, and chore and peacoats. She threw out “high contemporary” and then “premium contemporary.” Someone else offered “entry luxury.”
“Maybe we can workshop it,” Paltrow said.
Paradoxically, the missing button at the New York shows, the big ones as well as the independent ones, is knowing design. We’ve seen a great deal of desperate design, kitchen-sink collections with a bit of everything, with an abundance of ruffles and extreme shapes that are DOR even before they reach Instagram. The industry is just a big washing machine, churning and churning, and relatively few designers seemed to have the presence of mind to actually do less on their runways. “Make it count,” as Rose DeWitt Bukater said shortly before the Titanic went down.
The best example of this sane thinking is from Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, who put on a fantastic show on Saturday in a downtown gallery. It was as concise in its intentions as it was chic in style. And that may be the first time I’ve used “chic” to describe an Eckhaus Latta collection. The designers’ clothes are typically edgy and a bit strange with a sexual motor that’s often hard to put your finger on (which isn’t a bad thing).
The Eckhaus essence is still unmistakably present, but it was a surprise and a delight to see the designers open with a woman in a pair of masculine black trousers, worn with a sheer black tank top layered under a scoop-neck black vest, and a pair of kitten-heel sandals. She was followed by a guy in a slim black suit, the kind that rapidly demotes a lot of men’s styling. Shades of Helmut Lang? Yes, but only in that cool authority he offered in his early collections.
Elsewhere in the Eckhaus Latta show were simple, body-skimming dresses in creamy mesh knit or white cotton with broken hems creating a half-streamer effect and also T-shirts provocatively cut out in front in the shape of a large hole. A number of looks featured the extra layer of a matching half-apron.
Backstage, Latta, who had her newborn baby with her, said, “We know now not to overdo something — when a design is finished. Which feels like a new muscle memory for us.”
I asked the designers about the show’s title — God Has a Plan We Are All Waitresses in His Sick Little Restaurant.
Eckhaus laughed and said, “It’s the feeling of, like, who are we working for?”
Latta added, “We also keep making aprons. They’re so good! We’re in service.”
For his smooth-sailing collection, Joseph Altuzarra got inspiration from the confusion that many of us experience when looking at stuff today: Is it real or a fake? A number of his long, slim crêpe dresses — adorned with a spray of flowers or a scattering of faded petals — look two-dimensional. But once they move, they look 3-D because of the printing and sewing techniques.
The texture of a white dress evoked porcelain, while one of my favorite styles — a sleeveless, simply draped white dress with a deep side vent — looked like leather or perhaps paper. It’s plain old silk taffeta. Altuzarra also included snug jackets with balloon pants in dark shades of gray and blue. The outfits had that timeless look of Armani.
Todd Snyder knows how to make a fresh menswear proposal without taking you too beyond reason. His spring collection, “a sartorial postcard from La Buena Vida,” as he put it, draws on the distinct, sun-faded colors of Havana and Miami, and the sepia-tone elegance of mid-century attire, when people just got dressed and expectations were lower.
Snyder offers a lot but here, too, the telling is concise: somewhat high-waisted Hollywood-style trousers, striped cabana shirts and shorts, some terrific polo knits with a vintage vibe, and some sueded linens that have a nice hand and magically don’t wrinkle (or not much). His pinstripes also look different for being faded and are inspiring to anyone who loves the sex appeal of a suit but not the formality.
A couple of other collections over the weekend deserve mentioning: Ulla Johnson’s painterly prints in delicious tones, based on the work of Helen Frankenthaler, and a series of outfits at Monse, by Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, with minimalist tops or miniskirts in roped beads and, as well, a blue-striped cotton minidress with fabric knots. The designs were simply and artfully done.