“She’s a woman on the go. She’s a total New Yorker.” After the grandest of spring shows in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, Wes Gordon was back on home turf with his fall Carolina Herrera collection, and he enlisted a retinue of local artists and gallerists, among them Amy Sherald, Rachel Feinstein, Hannah Traore, and Ming Smith, the first African American woman photographer to have her work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, to model it.
Backstage Gordon indicated that the eccentric art lover Peggy Guggenheim, who was a New Yorker before she decamped for Venice, Italy, was a muse, though there was nothing as obvious as her trademark bat sunglasses to suggest it. Gordon isn’t rejecting the Herrera brand’s polite-society past—there were three generations of them in the audience today. But he did seem to be gesturing at a future of bolder self-expression, one mostly rooted in wardrobe separates.
Animal motifs abounded, as did calla lilies, the most erotic of flowers, and a pencil sketch of a stiletto pump modeled on the bottle of the brand’s best-selling Good Girl fragrance decorated button-downs, pencil skirts, and a pair of dresses with a distinct ’80s flavor. Carolina Herrera in her salad days could’ve been the inspiration for a couple of fitted little jackets with puff shoulders and calla lily buttons. Though Gordon paired them with asymmetric hem pencil skirts, he said that he anticipates Herrera customers will wear them with jeans and heels.
Occasion dressing remains an essential part of the business, but anyone in the market for a gown will have to look to the Madrid collection from spring. Here Gordon concentrated on cocktail dresses and party frocks. The sequined knit separates, as easy wearing as sweaters, were one example of how he’s thinking differently about evening. Another was the tie-neck jacket with fringed paillettes and black denim trousers that were worn by the artist Eliza Douglas, who was long a muse of Demna’s at Balenciaga. Not your grandmother’s Carolina Herrera, or your mother’s either.
