The energy at New York Fashion Week has been fantastic. There is a real sense of community—a lot of the attendees are friends of the designers, or models or stylists or makeup artists, so there’s a feeling that everyone is supporting the homies rather than gawking at celebrities and being bored by hokey ploys by big brands for the acceptance of skateboarders, which is how I remember fashion weeks past. Young people have always been New York fashion’s biggest supporters—people who shop at James Veloria and Cafe Forgot and Maryam Nassir Zadeh, who are clamoring for tickets to Papi Juice and hanging out late at night at the East River bandshell, who argue about Pyer Moss and Peter Do on Close Friends Instagram, who had Telfar bags before everyone else. But they and the designers they love have often been on the fringes. Now they’re at the center. On the one hand, that’s to say that designers like Eckhaus Latta, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, and Rachel Comey are now “mainstream.” On the other, it’s also to say that the rest of the industry has finally caught up to a brand like Luar, which returned this weekend after a three season hiatus, and its grand vision of hotness.
Generally, I’ve been struck by how sexy the shows have been—from Eckhaus Latta to Rachel Comey and, less surprisingly, at the comeback show for Luar, by the HBA cofounder Raul Lopez. But it’s a new kind of sexy, very American, I think, though of course America is on everyone’s mind because it’s the theme of the Met Gala and Costume Institute show. It isn’t sexy like a big Italian smooch or subtle like a French lover whispering about je nais se whatevs. It’s about ease, first and foremost, and also flesh—exposed breasts, butts that hang out of assless chaps (a look seen on an attendee, not a model, at Luar). It’s a braless, underwear-less state of being that prizes relaxation and grants confidence easily.
There are no longer any rules about who has “the right body” to wear a belly shirt or a tight skirt. (In fact, the skirt has been a dominant menswear silhouette in New York this season: both Russell Westbrook and Jordan Clarkson popped up wearing Thom Browne kilts.) Rachel Comey is expanding her line and sizing to accommodate gender neutral and male-identifying customers—as Comey put it after the show, it’s for customers to decide how they want to wear clothes, or how they want them to fit, based on their own sense of identity. When I interviewed her a few months before the pandemic, she thought she’d always stick to womenswear. But the past 18 months, she said, have marked such a huge shift in the way people shop and dress that she wants to speak more directly to her customer. She staged a dance show in collaboration with choreographer Beth Gill that showed those sorts of small moments that make up New York life—amping yourself up to walk into an interview or a first date, melting in your stupid demonic office chair at your stupid demonic desk job, the cinematic photoshoot you pass one morning on your way to a breakfast meeting. The writer Sarah Nicole Prickett said it reminded her of a parody of the 1980s art world, in particular, the movie Boogie Woogie: people charging around with great purpose, brandishing money and power, betraying and also having sex with each other. And that’s the progression of a fashion life in New York, I suppose! Call it the “raising your eyebrows at your demented boss in your secondhand Rachel Comey” to “fully embodying the demented boss in brand new hot bitch Rachel Comey” pipeline, if you will. Comey is also launching a resale platform, and the dancers/models removed and exchanged their jackets and sweaters and dresses—which exposed their bodies with that cool American abandon, but also created a sort of community of clothing. You know, the way you and your friends share a fancy dress or you borrow another person’s tie for a big job interview, or wear a friend’s sack dress out for a night just to see how it feels. See, this is New York fashion: launching a new business strategy with a fabulous choreographed dance show! Our finest designers, like Comey and Maryam Nassir Zadeh and Eckhaus Latta, are all interested in selling clothes, but they have figured out how to wear their commerciality lightly.
That was the message of the Luar show, too, with its sweatsuits and pearl-tux stripe trousers and different riffs on a huge oyster earring with swooping loops of pearls that I could see taking off like a Telfar bag. One imagines Lopez has stores like Nordstrom as well as Dover Street Market in mind. It’s striking to see Lopez as suddenly so of the moment, since he actually had a big hand in creating it. He’s relaunched and reworked his brand a handful of times over the past decade, but his constant is avant-garde toughness, plus a background in ballroom culture that prefigures the now industry-wide obsession with community. His fingerprints are all over Riccardo Tisci and Matthew Williams’s work, and many young designers (particularly of the Depop Couture school) seem to toil gratefully in his shadow. It’s like what Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground: only 10,000 people bought their first record, but every single one of them started a band. Everyone was cheering for the looks, and Lopez received a standing ovation, which felt a far cry from the stone-faced editors who clap politely for designers who, I don’t know, show in Manhattan or whatever. It’s true that not enough has changed in fashion since the twin reckonings of the pandemic and the protests of 2020, but there has been a power shift. Genuinely out-there designers like Lopez and Telfar Clemens have figured out how to make their clothing highly wearable without sacrificing that hungry madness. Lopez knows people want great pants, a fancy coat, a spiffy loafer. And what’s more, for those who are nuts for fashion but on a RealReal budget, he (like Clemens) knows that that customer doesn’t just want a t-shirt anymore—they want a talisman of a brand, something that shows they really give a fuck about what that designer has to say. For the Luar customer—or the Collina Strada customer, or even the Bode customer—wearing a designer is like a linkup, a cosign. And Lopez’s customers, as the incredible audience demonstrated, are some of the greatest personal stylists in New York, most of whom have only one very demanding client: themselves.
Spiritually in the middle of all this is Eckhaus Latta, who showed one of their best collections ever at their usual stomping grounds, on the street outside the bar Honey’s in Bushwick. There was a Helmut Lang zaddy-crispiness to their going-out tops, cut-out shirts, snap-knits (like perverted Agnes B cardigans), and see-through pants. And while they’ve done the sexy thing before, those collections were “cozier,” as Zoe Latta put it after the show. (I think a lot about Paloma Elsesser in a clingy knit dress in the Fall 2020 show, for example). This collection was almost slick, the fabrics harder and the horniness less doe-eyed. But of course, you can just pull on those swishy green transparent trousers and yank that holey turtleneck over your head and never think about what you’re wearing for the rest of the day. (Passersby may end up daydreaming about your exposed upper ribs or the black briefs visible under your pants, of course.)
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Clothing has not been sexy for a long time, for reasons I’ve written about before (prompted by the must-follow American designer Eli Russell Linnetz): Me Too; a new era of photographers; probably the rise of dating apps, which turned sex into a technological phenomenon that helped pave the way for the monetized platforms like OnlyFans that allow a subscriber to cut out the whole “dating” formality. And in fact, fashion has long been the opposite of sexy: it’s been camp. Leading up to and following the 2019 Costume Institute show on the topic, camp overtook American fashion in mass media—the red carpet, the Instagram fit pic and the brands that are practically native to the app—as the ruling order of the day. Everything was big, brash, yelling.
Interestingly, I think this new sexiness comes not in reaction to that—though it’s certainly more visually pleasing—but as an evolution of it. It comes from the same font of identity politics-driven self-expression, from the same desperate, pleading desire to be recognized and permitted to exist, to be your own wild self: you will see me, I must feel seen. But if our long national camp nightmare was a defensive pose dressed as an outrageous offensive strategy, this new sexiness is much more about freedom, nonchalance, and best of all, desire. (Frank Ocean, our sage of fashion who works months if not years ahead of the rest of the world, wore sleek nylon Prada to that Met Gala, tossing shade at the very idea of camp: refusing to be demeaned by a silly costume. Naturally, he’s now releasing his own take on those anoraks with Prada through his line Homer.) The moment is characterized by a vanity that purrs for tactility—see the long coats at Luar, buckled at the chest. You can imagine one on a Bergdorfs shopper at Art Basel, crisply layered over a Prada shift, or on a kid at a nightclub, no shirt underneath, a dance floor hookup sliding their hand under the belt.
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