A pair of artist Aaron Young s sculptures set the scene for Julien David s new collection. Mangled barricades dipped in 24-karat gold, they were a visual metaphor for his elevated streetwear. David paid special attention to fabrics this season, and they gave a lift to recognizable shapes—sweatshirts, tees, track pants. Metal-wire fringe was the flashiest of his experiments: A long T-shirt dress was looped with six kilometers of the stuff, and it took the machine that did it twenty-four hours, yet it retained the ease inherent to the silhouette. Same goes for the texturized black leather flight jacket and A-line skirt. It took a heck of a lot of work to get the leather to pucker the way it did, but you wouldn t know it from the cool street vibes it gave off. (Credit also goes to the collection s fuzzy-sided flatform shoes and headgear, a surprisingly cute hybrid of bucket hat and baseball cap.)
Those vibes are the key to David s ascent from 2012 ANDAM winner to Tokyo store owner in 2014. He also just signed on with Net-a-Porter. This collection should keep the love flowing in both directions. But we bet the e-tailer asks him for a little more of the sparkly metal fringe pieces and slightly less black. Because he was so involved with fabric development here, David more or less avoided color, and you couldn t help but miss it.
