"We wanted to celebrate all the happy and beautiful things in life." So asserted Susanne Ostwald, when asked about the inspiration for this season s Ostwald Helgason collection. Now, Ostwald Helgason is a cheerful brand, to be sure, but celebrating the happy and the beautiful? Surely that s a bit much. In these designers capable hands, though, it wasn t. The theme wasn t treated sardonically, but the execution was sly.
According to Ostwald, she and partner Ingvar Helgason riffed on the work of Sean O Malley, an artist so obscure Google has no record of him. Maybe the designers made him up, in which case their creation is a seventies-era Dadaist who used toys in his art and was a major hidden influence on Jeff Koons. (Or—who knows?—maybe it s all true.) At any rate, a motif that looked quite a bit like a Koons balloon sculpture showed up as a pattern on jacquard, as well as on a semi-risqué T-shirt appliqué. Elsewhere, Ostwald and Helgason elaborated on that motif by developing fabrics for their pleated skirts that were woven to resemble the skin of a balloon blown up taut; the effect was kind of like a textural dégradé, and the pieces were very cool.
The remainder of the collection, meanwhile, advanced Ostwald Helgason s trademarks—the bold florals, the trim tailoring, the sporty elements, the stripes. There was enough development in all those areas, and enough pop in the pieces themselves, that the consistency didn t read as boring. And you d really have to be a Grinch to be bored of fun, wouldn t you? One wonders what Sean O Malley would say to that.
