For
Thom Browne it
is a magical and "gender fluid" garden, for Tom Ford a lot of sportswear silk for a night at the disco: the curtain fell on New York Fashion Week with a couple of fireworks. Awarded several times by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Browne returned for just one season to New York and paraded in front of a parterre of entertainment and sports stars including Dan Levy of Schitt's Creek and Lakers player Russell Westbrook (both in one of her men's skirts). For four years, Thom, who joined the Zegna group in 2018, had been presenting his collections in Paris: the
Met Gala that celebrates the exhibition "In America: a Lexicon of Fashion"
brought it back to the Big Apple.
organized by Andrew Bolton, her partner in life. The story scripted for spring / summer 2022 in one of the Shed theaters at Hudson Yards is loosely inspired by the dystopian tale "The Garden of Time" by British writer JG Ballard. In the first act, two elderly "bachelors", more and more recluses, look with nostalgia at the semi-abandoned garden of their beautiful home, but here's the magic: the statues come alive, they shake off the limestone encrustations like a mantle of a thousand applied silk flowers by hand in various shades of gray and come down from the pedestal. The first garments of the show are the classic ones of Browne's lexicon, worn one above the other in a sexless virtuosity. The layered grisaille passes the baton to tunics toothey give way to the grand finale in a kaleidoscope of pink, red, purple, blue: inspired by the Greco-Roman galleries of the Met, Browne has given the statues back brilliant colors, showing the sculptures as they were originally painted. And here the theatrical coup, achieved by creating
trompe-l'oeil with hundreds of individually cut
and hand-sewn
tulle fragments
layered to imitate points of light and shadow.
It was
Tom Ford
, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, to close the week during which the Italian
Elena Pioli
brought a high fashion "capsule" of the Italian-Swiss brand
Sophia Nubes
to New York
, this time inspired, as the designer explained to ANSA, by the city that never sleeps. Twelve sets in all presented on a Soho roof in which silks and natural fibers such as hemp, silk organza and nettle are used to design architectural constructions such as in the long one-sleeve dress in which the asymmetrical panels of the skirt are supported by a dome. For Ford, the starting point came from a request from his eight-year-old son: to go and play basketball dressed in silk. This is how the sets of oversized-shouldered jackets, blousons, joggers and capri in a rainbow of bright colors: "The 70s seen from the 90s with a Los Angeles casual sensibility" explained Ford, former Gucci designer.