After one season in Paris and another off the calendar, Tim Hamilton is again showing his namesake collection in New York. And in a way, New York provided the germ of the collection: The designer sublet a studio from artist Ross Bleckner and, after rifling through the painter s archive, proposed a collaboration. Bleckner s smeary, abstract almost-florals, which appeared on Hamilton s jackets, pants, second-skin turtlenecks, and, for his women s collection, dresses and separates, unified the whole. Replicating Bleckner s vivid colors also gave Hamilton a chance to indulge his taste for far-flung production and fabric play. (He found a Japanese factory that was up to the task.)
Proportion usually gets goosed chez Hamilton, too. In both collections, jackets and shirts were lengthened to slightly creepy, attenuated effect, layered short-over-long. Hand-knit sweaters got long sleeves but cropped bodies. For men, shell-like outerwear in rubberized vinyl and neoprene looked protective, futuristic, and a little mutant. Uniforms and military trappings tend to loom large in Hamilton s imagination, and he mentioned Aldous Huxley s dystopian fantasies as a point of reference. There was a bellicose quality overall, only heightened by the glowering, street-tough models and their scowling doppelgängers, the boys in longtime collaborator Collier Schorr s photographs, printed on cotton T-shirts (part of Hamilton s secondary Redux range). With all that stewing, the Bleckner prints lent a kind of cooling levity; there was also some warm-blooded heat from the hints of shearling lining or the occasional blast of vermilion red. Some more of that wouldn t hurt. Brave New World it may be—but baby, it s cold out there!
