The exciting, young denimologist Masha Popova accelerated and expanded last season’s petrolhead theme this morning with a two-season show that took its inspiration from monster trucks. While combining fall ’23 and spring ’24 (the one-runway-a-year consensus among London’s hardscrabble independents is gaining traction), she demonstrated several developments since last September’s circuit. Chief among them was her expansion into menswear, which was effectively an anatomically tweaked recut of her powerful signature denim: It looked great.
The integration of silk and velvet into her lexicon added a fresh textural depth to her denim-dominated mix, which was also countered with jersey. After a trip to the Monster Jam truck event at the London Arena in July, Popova took her oxidized color palette of green, blue, bronze, and silver from the various “teams” that competed to crush things beneath their bizarrely oversized tires. On our benches was left a printed look book showing the cast posing by these very same trucks as empowered, high-octane pinups. As they were last season, tire treads were among the purposefully imprecise patterns (along with spirals and flowers) applied to the garments through flocking, overdyeing, rough pleating, and other techniques. Jewelry designed in collaboration with Rebekah Kosonen Bide ably accessorized Popova’s monster riff.
Similarly colored, dented, and eroded Dr. Martens made an excellent footwear foil to a collection you could see being worn by a wide cross-section of youthful tribes. The fits on Popova’s male cast members, plus a diverse female casting including one pregnant model, showed the versatility of her core crossover hip-flashing cut. It would be interesting to see her experiment with alternative silhouettes within her mostly Made in Ukraine, boot-cut-heavy offer. And it would be fascinating to see the result of a Popova collaboration or consultancy with any denim-oriented monster brand that had the intelligence to tap her.
