Blame it on Brooklyn…. On a visit to New York last year, Alejandro Gómez Palomo, who works from his village, Posadas, in the South of Spain, was invited to a party there. “It was, he explained, “this massive, crazy, dark, underground thing and I was thinking, ‘If hell had a place on earth, it’d be exactly like this,’ but then I enjoyed myself too much and I saw so much beauty and I was so happy and so liberated that I thought, ‘Why hell? This is what we know is heaven. Everyone was happy and everyone loved each other and there were no prejudices or anything like that.’ So that was really what started me thinking on this collection and got me to [the theme of] All of Heaven’s Parties.” Building on the theme, he presented his collection at The Church of the Divine Paternity on the Upper West Side.
When you think about it, it’s ironic that Palomo showed his triumphant, and rather religious spring 2024 collection, in the OTT Plaza Hotel (a place of business), and this more celebratory one in a place of worship. The designer carried over his interest in the Jazz Age and the ’30s here. Having decided to change to a one-show-a-year model, he went all-out in terms of craft. “I had my entire team, my family, my mom, my aunts… just embroidering crystals, embroidering feathers, and doing all this delicate [work] that I really enjoy making. I’ve been really, really hands-on in this collection.” That was evident in the piano-shawl-like fringe and tassels on satin tops, the siren-like finale dresses, swinging bands of beads on pants, and the incredible feather headdresses. Palomo’s charming collaboration with Bimba y Lola for spring 2024 (remember the rose bags), seemed to go into overdrive this time around. It’s not just that the designs were bolder, but they were too heavily promoted. But perhaps that’s in some way on theme.
“There’s always the aspect of romance and historical reference in my work, but then there’s always a [focus on the] now, understanding…what my community is experimenting with and is doing. I love to understand how people interpret love or sexuality these days.” Having done so at that massive rave, the designer came to the conclusion that “it’s the end of romance; it’s all about sex and choosing out of a catalog.” In other words, transactional. Understanding something is different than accepting it, and so Palomo, who usually loves a narrative, countered with a collection that was, for the most part, about transcendent beauty—and glamour.
Though the clothes looked more ’30s than ’20s, it’s the latter decade that Gomez spoke about, which is quite interesting, because at the time, the relative liberation of women aroused fears that men would become effeminate as women became stronger. There were moments when it felt as if Palomo were reversing the popular adage to assert “Anything girls can do, boys can do better.” The bows and furbelows in this line up aren’t worlds apart from the romantic touches in the collections of Simone Rocha or Cecilie Bahnsen, designers who celebrate a kind of hyperfemininity. Why can’t the bare back of a man be as seductive as that of a woman? Why can’t a man enjoy a sequin, the brush of chiffon against the leg? Or even the pantless look? Palomo seems to be asking those questions, but he’s not arguing for equivalencies. This is not drag or cosplay, rather the designer is challenging ideas about what a man should be, how he should appear to other people, and to other men, specifically. That gives power, and frisson, to his work.
As noted, the storyline seemed to be about beauty; the party in its title let Gomez indulge in dress-up clothes. One of the strengths of his show last year was that he applied his magic to daywear like jeans, showing how romance can blossom even in daylight. Here, he gave the humble T-shirt a glow up, rendering it in organza and applying embellishments, like feathers and beaded tubes at the collar and shirt sleeves. They are the perfect garb for earth angels, though there were fewer options for mere mortals.
