Light, free and unfettered: That’s how Christopher Esber is thinking about next spring. It’s how he’s seeing the clothes—there was so much here that was diaphanous, floating around and away from the body, yet still rooted in the reality of what a woman might want (and actually be able) to wear. Yet it also drove his creative process when he was working on it; that was just as unencumbered.
Standing backstage moments before the show, and exuding a preternatural calm that I only wish I could muster up for this Fashion Week (or for this lifetime, for that matter), Esber, who’s Sydney-based, and won the ANDAM prize this year, spoke about how he let his mind go wherever it wanted. “I was thinking about different fragments of different decades, whether it’s polka dots from the 1980s, or turn of the century underwear, or ’50s pin ups,” he said. “There is a very defined silhouette for the Esber woman, but I’ve definitely tried to evolve it this season.”
When he was talking about a defined silhouette, what he meant is what he calls “relaxed glamour.” In Esber-speak that means a look that’s pared back, minimalistic, and a tad—and this is meant in a good way—severe. It’s not like he has let that go. Take a look, for instance, at the way he interplayed draping into the strict lines of his black or stone suiting, or the gray pants which looked as though the waistband had been dipped in tar to give them a little hard-edged gloss. (It’s actually resin and has become a thing of his.)
As for that sampling across the decades Esber was talking about, you could see it in the prettiest pintucked and lace-trimmed long shorts cut from a delicate silk, or the way his dots formed an animated matrix on a killer draped dress with a high neckline, skinny sleeves, and a skirt that sinuously snaked to the floor. Esber brought a touch of the ’70s fused with the ’90s too, in the shape of two very good billowing anoraks with double pleating framing the shoulders and the body of the jackets. One had what he called, laughing, “an ugly Hawaiian shirt print.” Truth be told, it wasn’t ugly at all. What its use did indicate, though, was that Esber is letting his mind fly, seeing that what at first look like dissonant elements can be brought together, and then seeing where they land.
