Outside the Coach show on Monday, a woman was marching around topless on Park Avenue. Her semi-nudity was a little startling, given the snow still piled on the sidewalks, but it went with the animal rights sign she was holding while shouting: “Coach leather kills! Coach leather kills!” These days you have to be pretty extreme to get people’s attention.
Maybe that’s why Stuart Vevers, the creative director of Coach, and Catherine Holstein of Khaite said they were thinking about David Lynch, the master of the surreal and the extreme who died last month, when putting together their collections. Well, that and the fact that fashion loves a bit of cinematic inspiration. Retrospectives of Mr. Lynch’s most striking imagery have been ubiquitous. Technicolor normalcy taken to an absurd, terrifying length is apropos at the moment.
Not that the results of either collection were that obviously Lynchian. But the shows did offer the sense that there was something unsettling lurking just under the leather. And each of them had a lot of leather.
That the shows took place in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory was a coincidence, though Mr. Lynch might say there is no such thing.
Ms. Holstein went very literally dark, setting her collection in a black circle that looked like an alien landing site encompassed by a circular runway/yellow brick road. (In a preview, she said that “The Wizard of Oz” was Mr. Lynch’s favorite movie, and she threw in some other movie citations, including Merchant Ivory and the costume designer Edith Head, for good measure). Out paraded models in a lot of black with the occasional shot of blood red, though it was unclear where everything was leading. Not to the Emerald City. Maybe “Twin Peaks.” Or “Mulholland Drive.”
Her silhouette was blouson on top and skinny on the bottom. Slick leather greatcoats and exaggerated blousons mixed it up with giant boa constrictor-like knits. Cool deconstructed corsets were deboned to function more like little tubes you could shrug on over a tee, and puff-sleeve Edwardian frocks were remade in felted wool and fraying a bit at the seams. Inexplicably, everything was accessorized with black newsboy caps and leather opera gloves.
The problem with the Lynch connection is that, while he was always an original, it becomes more obvious with every collection that Ms. Holstein is just … well, not.
Her skill is in sensing which way the sartorial trend is blowing and digesting other designers’ work in a more palatable way. This season she ticked all the developing trend boxes, including thigh-high boots, fringe and leopard, as well as hitting notes previously played by Saint Laurent, the Row and Bottega Veneta. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — she has a lot of customers who appreciate the translation — but dressed up in the bombast of creativity, the effect is insincere.
Mr. Vevers set his show in the New York of the 1990s, when he arrived in the city, papering the walls of the Armory with images of brick tenements amid which live musicians — the synth-pop trio Nation of Language — played the eerie strains of a Lynchian tune. They set the scene for Mr. Vevers’s band of disaffected youth wearing plastic neon-framed sunglasses and toting teddy bear bag charms (the kind that are guaranteed to be best sellers).
The shrunken leather jackets were cropped to show a Y2K band of flesh, and giant, puddling jeans (all made from reconstituted denim) were not so much low-rise as appearing to cling desperately to the hips. The models looked like the remnants of an all-night rave, spilled out onto empty streets in the wee hours of the morning. The sense of dirtied up innocence was Lynchian, albeit the G-rated version. It was also very well done.
Everything was layered atop the giant trousers, which had the flow of evening skirts, including sheer 1920s frocks in sugary pastels and floor-length argyle sweaters in which the diamonds were more like moth-hole patches. Sometimes they were worn with big, fuzzy bunny rabbit slippers. The slippers turned out to have soles so they could be worn outside.
You almost wanted to take a pair to that protester, shouting out in the cold.
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