The Sportmax show asked some purposefully serious questions. However, the answers it mustered were sometimes unintentionally hilarious. We were placed around what appeared to be a rehashed version of Marc Quinn’s Garden from 2000, a long, raised vitrine containing lush and beautifully arranged tropical plants and flowers that fairly burst with fertility. Not unlike that Quinn piece, this vitrine—which was surrounded by a clinical, tiled runway—was designed to have you consider the contrast and potential tension between the natural and synthetic.
The notes put it thus: “One can wonder: Will nature, just like ancient rituals, traditions, and craftsmanship, also become the ‘memento mori’ of a world of extinct marvels, in which artificially generated replicas will be the only way we can experience life in the future? Is there a future without acknowledgment of the past? Is artificial the new natural? Is science the new art?”
So many questions. Answer-wise, the most cogent came via the application on some garments of partner artist Kristof Kintera’s works, titled “Postnaturalia,” that depicted flowers and herbs sprouting from wrecked circuit boards. These spoke to contemporary anxiety about screen time and the relative merits of virtual and visceral experiences. Also convincingly ahead of the curve was the woo-woo Oakley-esque eyewear worn by some models, which seemed to anticipate the soon-to-come paradigm shift in mobile cellular devices.
The clothes were less articulate in suggesting ways of addressing the issues so explicitly raised by the Sportmax team. Mannequin-esque molded tops, layered oversized tailoring, what looked like a silk floral jacquard dress with a lumpy neckline, and a dress made of skeins of pearlescent beads were wearable-ish conversation fillers. More ambitious were the pieces with radically raised boxy necklines that were possibly meant to be worn versions of the vitrine, hard shapes containing and constraining natural matter.
The oversized sex-toy bags and feathered arm-length gloves were conceivably inspired by that question-heavy starting point. The institutionally binding straitjacket pieces, meanwhile, were passingly reminiscent of the fashion asylum section in the fifth-anniversary collection of the one-before-Sabato creative director of Gucci. Which raised another question to which we are still awaiting the answer. This was a Sportmax collection that valiantly but rashly asked too much of itself. The vitrine, however, was beautiful to behold.
