LIKE NOTHING BEFORE
Is there anything left in fashion that is truly transgressive, any taboo that’s been left untouched? Last month, for his Spring 2017 ready-to-wear collection, Hood by Air (HBA) designer Shayne Oliver delivered powerfully disruptive designs that overturned conventions of gender, class, race and taste. HBA makes sophisticated separates
(sweatshirts, track pants, hooker heels, hightops) for knowing young creatives. At a time when many designers (Rick Owens, Kanye West) present high fashion with street inflections, HBA brings street-wise clothes into the world of high fashion.
HBA garments make a bigger impression on the runway than they do in ads and on real people. At first glance the ensembles look like outrageous feats of styling. Models in the recent show wore minimal makeup, with hair that was slicked back with
Vaseline or capped with a clear, waxy film. They looked as if they’d just awoken after a late, rough night. Men wore long, brilliantly-colored quilted satin robes, the kind boxers wear entering the ring, wide open, over black briefs, with fireman boots. Women wore parachute jumpsuits, in slithering nylon, pulled and belted around the waist like skirts. Both men and women wore cleanly tailored white dress shirts, folded, with black ties, looped around the neck like aprons.
Oliver’s aim is not to shock, but to assert something new and true. He’s a poet, and the garments, in addition to disrupting ideas about gender and grooming, disrupt the fundamental syntax of tailoring. Suit jackets are constructed like garment bags, from clear plastic with rounded shoulders. A pair of fluid silver pants falls straight at the right leg and balloons around the left leg. A womens miniskirt is assembled from three trouser waistbands, with pockets, stacked on top of one another. The most photographed piece of the show – and of all New York Fashion Week – was a pair of cowboy boots, itself a loaded iconography, with backward-facing boots attached at the heel. It’s simple, bold and brilliant. And it’s something we haven’t seen before.