What do Erwin Latimier and Britney Spears have in common? A preoccupation with work. With her hit 2013 song “Work Bitch” the pop star upended the values associated with the Puritan work ethic (in which toil is associated with virtue and sloth with sin), by flirting with ideas of domination, decadence, and role reversal, as power and labor are usually in the male domain. Latimier, whose brand tagline is “For the Performance of Masculinities,” did one better than Ms. Spears, opening and closing his spring 2024 show in the guise of Anna Conda, his drag alter ego.
The collection, his third as part of Copenhagen Fashion Week’s New Talent program, was in part a reprise of all the work he’s shown under that umbrella, and indeed, throughout his career as an independent designer. (Latimier performed as Ms. Conda at his Pitti debut.) Design-wise, he refined and coalesced elements of his previous outings such as deconstructed shirting, cutouts, subtle lingerie detailing, and restraints.
This public stock-taking was a smart move on several fronts. For starters, Copenhagen Fashion Week seems to draw bigger audiences every season, and it feels like there is an ever more critical mass of people paying attention to what is happening in Denmark—and the Nordics. (Fashion in Helsinki has partnered with CPHFW and Latimmier is one of three Finnish brands on the schedule.) Moreover, Latimier’s revisiting of his signatures didn’t feel like a rehash, it was instead a demonstration of how a brand can evolve, rather than constantly reinventing itself every three to six months.
The Wolf of Wall Street and entrenched “archetypes of men in power in North American films and television” were the starting point. Latimier wanted to explore “the sartorial choices that [men make] to express status and power, and how none of that’s really real.” At times he went hyperreal; a mustard-color ensemble featured a print of the brand’s actual ripped-up invoices and ballpoint pens were used as embellishments.
There were beautiful nuances, too. Patterned knits followed the peaks and valleys of a stock market chart, or perhaps a cardiogram heart monitor. Bonded “trouser boots” that created the illusion of suit pants could be read as representing the “losing of one’s pants” (as in an investment); they also resembled the thigh-high boots that have dominated the womenswear collections for several seasons. Whichever option you choose, they created a visual “glitch” that related back to the designer’s belief that “usually for the people in this [corporate] world, money and power aren’t usually really real; it’s just lies and debt and whatever. And maybe on a mental level,” he noted, [I was] “expressing how difficult it still is to work in this industry.”
The struggle of an independent designer was the subject of Latimmier’s last show; in this larger, wall-to-wall carpeted hotel conference hall, the designer let loose, and ripped things to shreds. Half-destroyed shirts looked like they had been put through the familiar office machine. Latimier imagined “the day the markets [crashed] and those fancy clothes all broke down.”
As if in a reversal of T.S. Eliot’s famous line, “in my beginning is my end,” Latimier’s shredded and cut-up clothes allowed room for light to come in. There was a delicacy, and, as the designer noted, a sensuality to many of the pieces. Latimier goes beyond stating the obvious fact that the old ways of doing things, and of signaling masculinity through fashion, are outmoded. He offers new and non-toxic ways to dress for a world where individuality, rather than uniformity, is valued.
