Spring 2024’s runway show during New York Fashion Week was an anomaly for Melitta Baumeister, the 2023 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winner. She has almost exclusively presented her work in a showroom in Paris, and that’s the format she returned to this season. “I feel the decision as an independent brand to do a show every season is just very unsustainable,” she explained on a call. A catwalk isn’t the only venue in which to express a point of view and Baumeister, a risk taker, is worth listening to.
Although the designer showed what might be her narrowest silhouette to date for fall, the entrenched beauty ideal—slim but curved—is something she’s never bought into, preferring instead to play with shapes in ways that redefine the female form, often using foam and horsehair to create exaggerated volumes, and the odd lump and bump. Baumeister’s fall collection was rather tame in terms of oddities, yet it was topical. Its protective aspects, piercings, warped shapes, Dracula worthy collars, and pointy shoes that looked like those found in Medieval manuscripts had a hard edge that is reflective of the chaos in the world.
“When I started the brand, the future was very desirable and I was looking far into the future and imagining it,” the designer said. “Then there was Covid and the future felt a bit more like the future is now, and it was more about community. Now I feel the future is a little hard to imagine. We’re not so easily moving and looking ahead, we are kind of scared of what’s coming, and so I feel like there are a lot of pieces that have a bit of a resistance.” To create that feeling Baumeister quilted faux leather on to foam, rather softer padding, she explained, for a puffier look. Pointed shoulders conveyed a “don’t touch me” vibe, and foam stuffing transformed polos into soft armor.
These were not clothes for the apocalypse, however. Yellow gold was used for an aten-like circular pleated dress. Another evening number with a long torso and a pouf skirt had a touch of metallic shine. That warm gold glow extended to daywear via a soft black denim woven with a yellow thread that you can see in the jacket lining and in the distressed hems. There was also a painted denim set in white-tipped black. Romance came in via ruching. It gently textured the taffeta jacket in the opening look and was used to create a wing-effect at the back of a cocoon-shaped, high-collar coat.
Irony might be the only way to read the brand’s recurring “happy face” motif this season, but Baumeister’s sense of humor is intact. The hot water bottle-shaped bags referenced the weeks she spent living with a broken heater in her New York City apartment. These were tablet sized, the designer explained. The props she is partial to are often surreal or inscrutable, so it’s not clear if the presence of the The New York Times and the books Design and Violence, and the Incomplete Encyclopedia of Touch, had any special meaning. In contrast a charm necklace dangled with house emblems like a banana, bicycle, and even the designer’s head.
Baumeister made use of a kind of oozing, expanding foam when developing sneakers with Nike and as a result, one of the pairs looks like it has been pulled out of wet cement, and another like it was covered with moss. Intentionally or not they seemed to capture the cultural inertia the designer’s been picking up on. “I feel like there’s no movement of being against anything; everything feels a little bit just wait and sit it out and it is what it is,” she observed. As a result, she decided against too much extravagance. “It’s just not of the times and I feel almost like we have to get through this; wearability is very important for me. Now is not the time for imaginative positive future thought; it just feels very mellow in a way.” What’s mellow to Baumeister would be OTT to many others, and if this collection was not extreme it certainly had bite.
