This Boss collection was hung within an elaborately constructed frame of context. Much of it was made to re-situate this mighty Metzingen maker towards the artsy sphere it overlapped with during its long running sponsorship of the Guggenheim-administered Hugo Boss Prize between 1996 and 2020. And some of it seemed conceived to give creative director Marco Falcioni license to guide this supertanker of a brand towards more interestingly muddied and sexier waters than it has lately navigated.
It was momentarily jarring to see Eliza Douglas installed under this fresh designer curatorship. She was one of a portfolio of cultural trophies drawn from the sphere of contemporary art and grouped on the Boss runway. The others included Ludovic Nkoth, Conie Vallese, Lea Colombo, photographer Ryan McGinley, collector Karen Boros and curator Neville Wakefield. That runway was a further element in the contextualization, and it was quite lovely. Artist Boris Acket recut a piece named Aesthetics of Decay: Its new iteration saw a runway-long sheet of opaque plastic foil elevated above the slickly silicon coated runway, where it flopped and crackled like a loose-rigged sail in a gentle breeze. Combined with the euphoric charge of Underworld’s Rez cut with Born Slippy on the soundtrack, it gave mid-’90s super-club.
And we weren’t even into the collection itself. Backstage Falcioni started with a mood board exposition before getting to the garments. The central thrust was a dialogue between the kinetic physical artistry of Pina Bausch and the precise industrial design of Dieter Rams, two appropriately German poles to play between.
Boss’s meat and drink remains tailoring, although it has broadened its range. Douglas’s look epitomized Falcioni’s application of that Bausch versus Rams line to this category: a loose cream suit worn with a narrow black belt and a long knotted black silk scarf. The suit had all the architectural construction of its parallel form, but it was expanded in volume, rolled of sleeve, and collar popped to generate a sense of free movement. This seemed to be part of the Paradox after which the collection was named.
“We want to have something like kink,” said Falcioni as we bustled through the line-out. “It’s a little bit of Berlin.” The double-faced lamb leathers, opaque raffia knits, compulsively wonky triple-clipped ties, and most of all the slithery-light garments in black eel skin all telegraphed the implication. There was a great deal of knotting; on shoes, bags, headscarves, and ties. Falcioni said he’d worked especially hard on perfecting the pieces that incorporated sheets of silicon draped into sensually falling but also artificially fleshy folds.
Another vaguely paradoxical element was the insertion of a sneaker based on Formula One driving boots. And underneath all the sexed-up sturm und drang and the elaborate art-world framing lay one more, happy paradox: This was still a collection packed with pieces which, once de-styled, will sit prettily across Boss’s enormous global retail network.
