White Walking

Veronique Branquinho: To Be Free

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

I meet Veronique Branquinho on the 21st floor of a high rise in Chelsea where she’s showing her pre-Spring 2016 collection. She’s in a corner suite with floor-to-ceiling windows that glance out over the Hudson, where industrial barges and cruise ships coarse by in clouds of spray and vapor. The evening is pearly grey and the room feels weightless, suspended up here in a box of steel and glass. Weightless, too, is the effect of the collection: dresses, all white and long, draped on a sparse cluster of forms with a lone live model at their center. Her dress is black with leather straps and falls to the floor. I think of Greek columns and their counterpart in ancient draperies, where the cloth is suspended simply from the shoulders and takes shape only with the moving body.

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Comme des Garcons: Floriental

Fashion, Retail

Comme des Garcons is no stranger to the perfume business and has been knocking out great scents year after year at a good clip. Its new fragrance, Floriental, comes from the idea of reimagining a flower that has no scent (in this case, the Cistus flower). It also redefines traditional notions of perfume-making with no definite top, middle, or base scent notes.

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Thom Browne S/S 16 Men’s – New York

Fashion

Yesterday, Thom Browne presented a capsule menswear collection for the inaugural men’s fashion week in New York. The presentation, titled The Officeman, was held at nine in the morning, but Browne is one of the very few designers whose work demands such commitment from the fashion crowd.

The presentation was held in what was essentially a concrete cube. The line was long as only twenty people at a time were allowed in (the complimentary coffee and croissants helped). But it was well worth it. Once you stepped inside you found yourself in a completely mirrored room. In it was an office desk with a typewriter and some stationary items, all polished like heirloom silver on a wedding day.

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Inferno: Alexander McQueen

Culture, Fashion

Proliferation of books on the designer Alexander McQueen since his suicide in 2010 has been a boon to his fans. Or an unabashed attempt by publishers to exploit his death for monetary gain – you decide. On my recent visit to the “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” exhibit in London there was literally a wall of books devoted to him. Before his death the number of books I remember seeing devoted to McQueen, probably the most talented designer who has ever lived, was zero. The best attempted at analysis was done by Caroline Evans in her important book, “Fashion at the Edge.”