It was striking in the New York Fashion Week that finishes on Monday, how few designers made any comment on the current American government’s policies.
Especially given the Trump administration’s obvious attacks on key pillars of that fashion community – gay people, Asian Americans, Latinos and women.
There were a few obvious exceptions. Notably Jamaican-born Rachel Scott, whose collection for her brand Diotima, was rippling with Afro-Cuban symbolism and in part made by Refugee Atelier in New York.
Michael Kors, to his credit, was outspoken about an action which reverberated throughout the fashion community last week when the government took down an LGBTQI+ flag at The Stonewall Monument. That is the monument to gay liberation, which celebrates a spontaneous riot after a police raid on a gay bar named Stonewall in the West Village. It is often noted as the beginning of the gay civil rights movement.
Last Monday, the government of Donald Trump, took down the LGBTQI+ flag from a flagpole at the monument, on the spurious ground, that it was located in a national park. The latest example of Trump’s whole attack on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, during both of his administrations.
“We will put the flag back. You cannot erase people’s history. New York is the melting pot of the world. Look at our cast, Somali models from Minnesota; Italians living in the East Village; Chinese models living in Bushwick. My grandmother came here with nine dollars. And when they listed her race on the immigration card, they wrote Hebrew. People congregate in cities and reinvent themselves. And you know what people fight back,” said Kors in response to FashionNetwork.com, at a pre-show preview.
By Thursday the LGBTQI+ flag was back up.
Many designers did wear ICE Out badges, but criticism of Trump was rare. It was noticeable that at the uptown collection of Tory Burch in Sotheby’s auction house on Madison Avenue, the inspiration was the garden designer Rachel “Bunny” Mellon. However, in her program, Burch made no reference to the fact that Mellon was the celebrated designer of the White House Rose Garden during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. A garden, which Trump paved over recently, in many horticulturists’ opinion, desecrating a famous element in American style.
Diotima: Femme fatale fantasy
The most public counterblast was at Diotima by Rachel Scott, a fashion show in New York that referenced the violent suppression of immigrants by the militarized police force known as ICE.
A Diotima collection created in collaboration with Refugee Atelier in New York – “women from across the world whose skills carry their own histories of displacement and resilience,” read Scott’s program.
The collection’s leitmotif was La Femme Cheval, a divine horse-headed woman that is a figure or spiritual power and a response to colonialism. A key subject in the art of Wifredo Lam, a Cuban artist who blended Afro-Cuban spirituality with European modernism and Chinese calligraphy.
“An ancestral pull, insistent and pressing… his visual language carries a consciousness that resonates deeply with my own,” Scott said, explaining her inspiration for this season.
Staged inside an early 20th-century, Gothic-style skyscraper on Broadway, the show opened with a French TV clip announcing an exhibition of the work of Lam, who moved to Paris and became a close friend of Picasso and Matisse.
The result was a series of powerful heroines, in dramatically flared coat dresses. Riding jacket shapes that flared into coats, often finished in bold peplums. The fabrics were rich and exotic – like translucent textiles revealing skin; or a remarkable distressed mohair with a viscose that mimicked fur – seen in the fantastic opening look.
Column silhouettes elongated the body, while fringe suggested manes and whips.
Most memorable of all were the use of Lam bold graphic prints with masks and faces and Chinese brushwork seen in gowns and cocktails. Made of digital prints on Gobelin jacquards or hand applied organza intarsia.
Overall, an elegant statement of women’s power, just weeks after an ICE agent killed a mother of a three-year-old, who was trying to help her neighbors.
“This collection takes shape in a political and cultural moment marked by exhaustion and division, where resilience, identity and memory become acts of resistance. It is about the woman who moves through it with radiance, force, and radical self-definition. Not in spite of the times, but within them,” read the program of Scott.
Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen: Couture cosplay in Lower East Side
There are not many fashion cults in Manhattan, though few are happier with themselves than those who love Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen.
She presented a disheveled and romantic collection above a dingy storefront, in a shabby corner of the Lower East Side, on a cold Sunday afternoon. Many of her customers were there: young, slim women that were faintly bedraggled, and all extremely excited to be wearing her undyed, white cotton toile looks. The kind a Paris couture house might have made, and then thrown through a washing machine, and not ironed too well afterwards.
Zoe is clearly talented. She has an innate understanding of historical fashion techniques that would probably make her an interesting addition to a couture house. Her designs are self-consciously arty mashups of second-hand linen; deadstock bolts; vintage nylon. She dyes with gusto – especially her sinful red – adding punch to her racy Victorian style.
The collection clearly touched a chord with young women in the tight space. As one left, several keen fans were placing iPhones on convenience store windows, to pirouette and pose in mock fashion shoot videos, and post the resulting images on social media. All part of the cult that she has created.
Private Policy
Private Policy by Chinese designers, Haoran Li, invited guests to Webster Hall, a famous little concert hall in Lower Manhattan, where the likes of the Ramones, U2, Blondie and Parliament Funkadelic have played over over the years.
Though the theme of the collection was the history: Chinese laborers who came to America in the 19th century to build the transcontinental railways of America.
So, Li played on all sorts of American iconographic looks – rancher jackets, Western shirts or football jerseys to, but finished with Chinese detailing and buttons.
There were workwear silhouettes, functional cuts and reinforced seams – referencing the physical demands of railroad labor in the 19th century.
However, while the railroad was built in sunlight, the show was staged in near darkness, making it rather difficult to spot many of the details in the collection.
A fast-paced show backed up by an excellent soundtrack, by Maison Labtonic, which really set the stage. But one suppose the point of the idea was that a darkened club is exactly where the clothes will most likely be worn, when you’re looking to meet someone good looking and cool.
“Party animal has always been at the center of our DNA,” smiled the designer, who said his theme was a desire that the two huge nations would love harmoniously together.
But in a sign of our times, two subway stops away, an artist had spray-painted Little Italy’s last remaining diner, with six-foot tall letters reading: “Stop Asian Hate”.
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