This collection and show’s germination dates back to last year, when Jonny Johansson saw an installation by the artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase at Sadie Coles HQ in London. Backstage tonight Johansson recalled how he was affected and inspired by the work’s “tenderness, playfulness and spontaneity. And it made me think that I’d been going too mad for fashion, and that I wanted to do something different, and maybe take more of a risk.”
Due credit to that thought’s catalyst was the new installation by the artist installed within the Acne Studios runway space tonight. That the raised curated arrangement of layered furniture and sculpture could be adorned with a front row of mostly Acne-wearing show-watchers encapsulated this liminal spanning of fashion and contemporary art.
Lyndon Chase’s explorative approach to domesticity, privacy, and “interior moments” was reflected in a collection that seemed sometimes upholstered by materials drawn from interior design. The garments also seemed to reflect an ambiguity within—or at least an ambivalence towards—the codes of identity that clothes so often encapsulate. Like much of the furniture, the garments were fundamentally conventional, yet through the process of making had become altered and amplified to interrogate that convention.
This was fun. The models wore crushed coiffures and librarian’s rimless spectacles—possibly inspired by Johansson’s childhood piano teacher—as they walked past in clothes you sensed they would (and should) never grow into entirely inhabiting. Tailoring in padded mock-croc and leather overcoats was oversized and amplified. Knit looks were artfully disarrayed as if put on while still entangled from the dryer. Shrunken tops in what looked like boiled wool blankets were frayed and picked at along their edges.
All this made great context for some masterfully meta mom jeans worn under fitted tops in floral-pattern waxed tablecloth coverings (at least apparently). These jeans were fitted at the waist but then flew wide and straight at the hip, down either to a multi-break hem or a wide-cuff edged in more florals (just like some cool kids used to). Evening looks included jersey dresses in angularly layered irregular seams of differently printed fabrics—the result of some fierce argument at the haberdashery—and an endearingly klutzy lampshade gown spattered with bows: formal abnormal.
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