The question going into Gabriela Hearst’s show today—other than how to get an Uber out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard with the snowstorm—was whether or not her exit from Chloé after a three-year creative directorship would impact her own label. A life reset like that is a powerful thing, but this collection was less a rethink of her aesthetic and approach than a doubling down.
She has reason to lean that way. At a studio appointment Hearst said that leading up to a show her store is always busy with VIP clients ordering custom pieces to wear in the front row. “It’s huge days for us pre-show, they want one-of-a-kind things.”
On the runway, a quilted denim duster coat felt like a callback to a puffer vest from the earliest days of her brand. “But it’s better, because it’s not actually denim, it’s recycled cotton with hemp,” she said, meaning it’s easier on the environment than a garment made from new denim. Sustainability is one of her brand tenets. A dress with a bodice and a single puff sleeve in gold leather was reminiscent of spring 2023, when she was channeling Athena, the goddess of war. Feminism, of course, is another rallying cry.
This season Hearst was talking about Leonora Carrington, the British surrealist painter and author who later became a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. “I’ve been feeling for a while that surrealism was the movement that explained the atrocities of the First World War,” said Hearst. “Humanity hadn’t seen anything of that scale at that point: A bit of what we’re going through today, through all the wars and the conflicts and the famines, surrealism feels relevant.”
Here and there, things weren’t what they seemed. The “fur” of a pair of coats, for example, was actually woven cashmere sheared with vertical lines to evoke the real thing. Or else, fabrics were manipulated to look unfamiliar, like the trench in crinkled leather. The collection could have stood a bolder interpretation of the magical realism and alchemy Carrington depicted in her dreamlike paintings. Doubling down makes good business sense, but wouldn’t it be something to see Hearst really let it rip?
