Anti-Algorithm Fashion
Two entirely different collections from Telfar and Rodarte have one very important thing in common.
About halfway through the Telfar show/happening, held Sunday at a helipad on East 34th Street, the plastic tarp that had been protecting the audience from the rain pelting down blew away. There was a big whoosh as the water that had collected on top poured off the back. People shook their heads like wet dogs and put their umbrellas up. But beyond the chain-link fence that separated attendees from the tarmac, where a drummer sent up sprays of water every time he pounded his kit and FAKA, the South African performance art duo pranced and sang, the mood definitely was exultant.
Later, in the rose-strewn garden of the Marble Cemetery in the East Village, the Rodarte show — returning to New York after almost two years off the collection treadmill for a film and couture — took place, with assistants scurrying around with paper towels to wipe water off the wooden seats meant for guests. Out came the models, like refugees from a perverse fairy tale, raindrops glittering like crystals on the tulle.
“You’d think they would have had a contingency plan,” grumbled one guest, huddled close to a seat mate. Fashion creates weird bonds between us all.
A person would be hard pressed to find two brands as diametrically opposed as Telfar, the gender-blind, trend-agnostic line by Telfar Clemens that has fetishized the one-shouldered top and left-of-center proportion, the subway performative embrace of self, and Rodarte, where the sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy traffic in the stuff (and fluff) of cinematic fantasy: lace and ruffles and rosettes and point d’esprit, often seen through a darkened lens.
But they have one crucial thing in common, which is what sets them apart as much as the bifurcated jeans on Telfar’s runway, sliced wide at the thighs and belted with his circular T logo clasp, or the black swan leather frocks and bejeweled floral capes on Rodarte’s: an increasingly confident adherence to their own ideas about what the world should look like now.
They make what they want, in the way they want. If that means getting rained on, so be it. If that means they lose audience members to shelter, well, O.K. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s getting harder and harder to find. The industry bends toward compromise.
There’s a lot of pressure these days to design by algorithm. We know too much about buying habits and likes, and the result is an insidious bias toward giving people what they have already indicated they want. It may be safe, and easier to sell, but it’s antithetical to the whole point of fashion, which should be about giving people what they never knew they wanted — what they couldn’t imagine they wanted — until they saw it.
There’s a clarity to such commitment that keeps people in their seats, a ruthlessness toward pandering to the prevailing winds (or rain) that is itself desirable.
It’s good for designers to get out of their comfort zone, the way Sander Lak did at Sies Marjan by adding stripes, both maritime and pin, and print to his signature luscious palette, and toughening up his silks with canvas and leather. Ditto Brock, where Laura Vassar Brock and Kristopher Brock injected a fringed, Georgia O’Keeffe vibe to their usual undone Marie Antoinette-as-a-milkmaid styles. Even if the results are uneven (which these were). But trying to please too many people too much of the time can lead to confusion.
This is often the problem with Prabal Gurung, whose embrace of cross-cultural female multiplicity and strength (and, this season, male) is laudable, but tends to lead him in all sorts of seemingly random directions. It can be hard to follow.
The collection started notably well, with bright color-blocked separates for men and women that took their cues from both the Nepalese prayer flags crisscrossing the ceiling and the current activewear mood. But, as tends to happen with Mr. Gurung, it then went segueing off into suits with dropped-crotch jodhpur pants, cropped trousers bristling feathers, sari sequined frocks and beaded fringe and at the end, some stiff silk faille gowns that appeared to have gotten lost on the way to the cotillion.
At least they didn’t look as though they had gotten lost in the archive, however, which was the case with Escada, celebrating its 40th anniversary with its first runway show. In honor of the event, the designer Niall Sloan went back to the brand’s history. Way back. Back to the days of big gold buttons and bigger shoulders. Back to power jackets and power colors. Back to the ’80s and ’90s. Back to Julia Roberts trying to imitate a member of the bourgeoisie in “Pretty Woman.” And in that quicksand, without any irony to rescue him, he got stuck.
It almost made you wish for a thunderstorm.
Vanessa Friedman is The Times's fashion director and chief fashion critic. She was previously the fashion editor of the Financial Times. @VVFriedman
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