It’s been two years since Rachel Comey put on a runway show. She’d more or less sworn them off, one of the few designers to commit to the alternate formats that so many talked about during the pandemic. But with a collaborator like Joan Jonas, the multimedia and performance art pioneer, a lookbook release wouldn’t cut it.
A spry octogenarian in a pair of printed Rachel Comey pants, Jonas was stationed about midway down the runway that the designer had set up in Great Jones Alley, snapping iPhone photos of every look. “She’s lived and worked here a few blocks from our studio for 50 years,” Comey said afterwards of her attraction to the artist. “And she’s so brave, so dynamic in terms of the different mediums she uses, from performance to live drawings to installations.” (She credited Soft Network, an arts non-profit, for the intro.)
Woman-to-woman inspiration is as good a reason as any for an fashion-art hookup, and the positive vibes were flowing despite the spirit-sapping late season heat wave. Maybe that’s because Comey and Jonas are such a nice fit, kindred spirits across generations, both reluctant to be hemmed in by their respective industry’s rules. One of the succinctest descriptions I’ve ever heard about Comey’s clothes is that they’re “basic without being basic.” Here, the pieces that lifted from Jonas’s oeuvre were special without being showy. Too much of the fashion and art scenes are pretentious.
Direct nods were easy to clock: a miniskirt and dress were embroidered with fringe in the style of a gallery poster bearing Jonas’s name, and the silver foil separates could be linked to her penchant for mirrored surfaces. The model who wore the foil skirt at the end of the show carried a full-length mirror in the crook of her arm, a detail that seemed to give Jonas a kick. Abstract printed jersey pieces were apparently lifted from the artist’s video work, but could’ve just as easily come from Comey’s own colorful, irreverent playbook.
“It was the first time I had this enormous archive of somebody’s life’s work. All of us in the studio were making textiles, embroideries, knit pieces, and embellishments of different kinds, all based on Joan’s work. And we just had so much fun,” Comey said. That may be the real lesson of this match-up: to commit to experiment, and to have fun.
