Think decon can’t be sexy? Think again. This was Ellen Hodakova Larsson’s most revealing show, both in terms of skin and self. She described the opening looks as being apron-like: backless coats and pants revealed boxers. At the same time that she is showing more skin, the designer said she’s “moving things inwards a little bit more and [the work] becomes my autobiography in a way.”
Clothes are one way we reveal ourselves, interior decoration is another. Larsson was thinking of various states of being (social, inner, true selves) and the idea of home. (A building houses a person; clothes are a home for the body; and the body is where the self dwells.) A horsewoman who was raised on a farm, Larsson is deeply tied to the land and a sense of home. She conjured the latter most directly, creating a walled set with models walking by a long dark wood table. There was an itty-bitty bra made of teacups; a rug was crafted into a capelet, and some garments incorporated chair parts.
Mirrors were used as props but they were representative of introspection (and in the case of the three-panel one, Last Weekend at Marienbad), rather than interior design. The models with mirrors wore white looks made from bed sheets, perhaps referencing the pure self or the subconscious surfacing in dreams. Larsson alluded to something similar by excavating found objects and repurposing or reframing them within a sartorial context. The silken strands that snaked up the body and linked at the neck (as zippers have in the past) were not shades of blonde hair samples but horsehair violin strings, which tied into Larsson’s beauty reference, “a sweaty pianist.” She imagined the musician being well-dressed for the performance, and then getting lost in the music. The true self, she said, “is created by those actions.”
The first half of the collection, which included a collaboration with Harris tweeds, was narrow and pared back. (Now there is a “school of Hodakova,” with many designers following her lead, that neatness and tightness was a kind of reframing of her work.) Things got more conceptual, and less viable as ready-to-wear as the show progressed (would you want to be the person sitting behind a chair top at a show?) Most provocative were the hunchbacked forms that models adopted, clutching their bodies. The idea was that you are dancing with yourself—or selves.
We all contain multitudes. Larsson’s gift to fashion is that she is revealing the possibilities in existing objects and materials, and thereby bringing the past into the present.
