Can you have your cake and eat it, too? Preen designers Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi certainly gave it a go today. Like a lot of designers this season, Thornton and Bregazzi were trying to inject a dark, grubby, punk-inflected energy into luxe, dressed-up clothes. That s not an easy marriage to pull off, and Bregazzi and Thornton responded to the difficulty by making it overt and giving their looks a split personality. This was a purposefully schizophrenic show. Its dark, grubby, punk inflection had an inspired reference: Derek Jarman s New Wave cult film Jubilee. Released in 1978, this hard-to-summarize dystopian flick features such icons of the era as Adam Ant and Siouxsie Sioux, and the collection riffed on their jagged, post-punk aesthetic. Most notably, there was a lot of play with biker-jacket shapes and details, and the vast majority of the looks were in some combination of black, white, and red. One of Thornton and Bregazzi s cleverest ideas was to pick up the grainy quality of Jarman s film and apply it to prints such as a pixelated leopard and smudged silk tartan.
Then there was the show s alternate personality, derived from Richard Avedon s shots of fifties couture model Dorian Leigh. In several looks Thornton and Bregazzi literally jammed full skirts together with pencil-shaped ones in wool crepe, creating dresses that looked wholly different front to back. It was an interesting idea but not altogether effective; perhaps it was simply executed with a surfeit of good taste. At any rate, the Leigh/Avedon influence asserted itself plenty in the polished finish here: Most of the standout looks interpreted the Jubilee theme in more or less straightforward ways, but they had a soigné quality you had to credit elsewhere. To wit, the red and black blouse with an asymmetric collar, worn atop a long black skirt that split to open a vein of blood red silk, or the silk maxi dresses in grainy black and white prints. The colorful crystal embellishment that appeared toward the close of the show seemed a bit out of nowhere after the rigorous elaboration that preceded it, but these pieces also managed to capture the collection s overarching tone of sophisticated and rather chilly New Wave nihilism. Indeed, the irony was that this exploration of duality was almost too coherent.
