UnCultured

The Year in Fashion: In Praise of Young Independent Designers

As this wholly unpredictable year in fashion draws to a close, there suddenly appears to be no such thing as a long-term career as a name-in-lights creative director of a house anymore (always excepting Karl Lagerfeld, that is). The way things are shaping up, maybe we’re looking at a whole new world where hot names and their teams will be booked like bands at festivals. They’ll strut onto the house stage, play a couple of killer sets, and then exit, in time-honored music business mode, before the encore, leaving the audience baying for more—and wondering where their next gig will be. Basically, that’s what Raf Simons did at Christian Dior.

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The Best Collections of Spring 2016

Spring 2016 is a wrap, and if there’s one thing that defined the season it’s change. It started on day one, when Riccardo Tisci brought Givenchy to New York for an ambitious and poignant September 11 show, inviting nearly 1,000 nonindustry guests. Expect to see more public-facing shows next season. And it continued until the very last day of Paris, when Kering announced that Vetements’s Demna Gvasalia would take over for Alexander Wang at Balenciaga, one of the most storied names in the business. A virtual unknown just a year ago, Gvasalia is all but guaranteed to shake up the Balenciaga status quo.

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Hood by Air Spring 2015 LFW

Institutional oppression isn't his thing. So it wasn't a total surprise that Oliver pointed to the chokers in his show—and the gussied-up crutches—as part of a commentary on the breakdown of machismo. A key theme of this show, he explained, was an interrogation of what it means to be a man. Hence the deconstructed blazers and fatigues, the riff on the three-piece suit, the very on-trend and very appealing reinterpretations of traditional shirting, for both girls and boys. And for people who refuse to identify with any one particular gender. This was a Hood by Air show, after all.

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