Fashion Review Mondays: Alexander Wang Spring/Summer 2014 Collection
By Olivia of WangGuk
This Monday’s fashion review is on Alexander Wang’s new Spring/Summer collection. As always, the show was overall fresh, new, exciting, and embodied innovativeness.
The show opened with an easy, white, cropped long-sleeve shirt coupled with a flirty hip-hugging mini skirt. Everything about this look and those that followed says “Spring.” The collection includes everything from structured menswear-type jackets, to flowing knee length skirts, to perforated leather coats, to logo-mania at its finest. When I think “menswear wool jacket”, I wouldn’t typically assume it to be a feminine item. Alexander Wang achieves this, through a masculine-does-feminine twist.
And when I look at the shape of these menswear-gone-womenswear jackets, I can see what makes them so sexy. Alexander Wang always knows what he’s doing in terms of shape and cut— he’s a master at designing cuts that flatter a woman’s body. So, with the right shape, a heavy wool jacket can look quite sexy, and still maintain a sense of conservativeness because of the fabric choice.
Logo-mania is another key player in Alexander Wang’s new collection. Logo-mania, which first rocked the high-fashion scene in the 1990s, is something Alexander Wang really played with in this collection. He said he wanted to bring the energy and fun of logo-mania to this collection, and channel it into the “necessary wardrobe items of today.” He completely achieved this.
His reference to the 90s suddenly becomes new and fresh and chic in this collection. He took something from the past, made it his own, and executed it in a way that made it modern. This logo-mania reference is woven throughout the collection, and was incorporated into the luxurious and hotly-discussed perforated leather coat, in which Alexander Wang’s name is laser-cut into the leather.
Another refreshing feature of his show was the styling. In so many ways, styling can easily kill a beautiful collection— it can become over-worked or busy, but this Spring collection is flawless. Once again, Alexander Wang has captured that New York girl. The make-up was barely there, the hair was just polished enough to be chic, but just unkempt enough to embody the effortless cool of a girl who can go straight from her bed to the streets looking edgy yet put-together.
What is arguably most notable about this collection— and a trademark of Alexander Wang’s work— is the seamless execution of androgynous beauty. His pieces always reference both feminine and masculine ideas; he so often incorporates both feminine and masculine into the same look. He does it using menswear wool and cutting it into a feminine shape, or by pairing a cropped flirty tank top with tailored wool trousers. And most of the time, this marriage of masculine and feminine is even more subtle than his stylistic choices. He can take a tailored menswear wool trouser and make it suddenly feminine by making the pant a capri, or tilting the pockets ever-so-slightly in a way that makes them so flattering on a woman’s body.
Alexander Wang is seriously pushing the envelope as far as innovativeness and fashion-forwardness. His aesthetic captures a beauty that is both masculine and feminine, but at the same time is neither. The beauty in his clothes is an elevated kind of beauty— a new kind of chicness. His clothes say “beauty is beyond being gendered.” His clothes speak of a new height for modern fashion, where menswear meets womenswear and where relaxed downtown edge meets high-fashion chic. Most importantly, his clothes are not merely clothes; they are words, spoken from designer to wearer, where wearability and utility are never lost in translation or sacrificed for the sake of innovation and creativity.
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Thanks and credits to the following for pictures and video interviews 🙂
jeffybruce.blogspot.com
pompousmongoose.tumblr.com
suedefingers.tumblr.com
http://www.youtube.com/user/videofashion?feature=watch
watch full show here>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbzTeM7vm50
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