Rihanna had been rumored to attend Vaquera tonight. As far as I could tell she didn’t turn up, but I did spy Julia Fox and Richie Shazam on the balcony. They were treated to Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee’s best show in some time. Back in the old days, the Vaquera designers decided on a theme and ran with it. One season it was doubt and faith, another identity crises. A year before the pandemic, they were thinking—rather presciently—about the early-onset domesticity of their twenty-something friends. Lately, though they’ve had commercial successes with their denim and jersey offerings, their runway efforts have felt more diffuse and vague.
This time around, they were steamed up: about the time crunch between seasons, about a lack of days off, about their not so impressive bank accounts almost a decade into their design careers. What really ticked them off, they said, is how much they found themselves caring about money. There’s only one word for that: relatable!
“Fashion these days is dominated by the crudest form of currency,” DiCaprio said. “We felt like in the past, artistic merit, a vision, and being punk was a bit more of a powerful currency.” And so, in a punk move, they developed an American currency print—not an easy thing to do on image creation tools, apparently—and graffiti’d Andrew Jackson’s eyes or painted over his face with hearts, and stamped the word FAKE over the White House. And then they used it for a matching button-down and tie, the cummerbund on a loose-fitting pair of trousers, and the three-dimensional rosette bodice on a cocktail dress.
Toying with another currency—sex—there were cone bra tops and cone bra-printed t-shirts, titty twister tees à la their icon Vivienne Westwood, and distressed leather chaps, one of the season’s surprise trends. Claire Sullivan, with whom they operated Vaquera as a trio before her departure during Covid, wore a shrunken polo shirt with bulls-eye breast insets.
DiCaprio and Taubensee aren’t naive enough to think that fashion is an artistic pursuit, but they aren’t cynical enough to believe that it’s all about dollars and cents, either. They would like a day off, but then again, they wouldn’t change it. “I’m grateful for where we are,” DiCaprio said. Keep grinding, guys.
