The Best Collections of Spring 2016
Spring 2016 is a wrap, and if there’s one thing that defined the season it’s change. It started on day one, when Riccardo Tisci brought Givenchy to New York for an ambitious and poignant September 11 show, inviting nearly 1,000 nonindustry guests. Expect to see more public-facing shows next season. And it continued until the very last day of Paris, when Kering announced that Vetements’s Demna Gvasalia would take over for Alexander Wang at Balenciaga, one of the most storied names in the business. A virtual unknown just a year ago, Gvasalia is all but guaranteed to shake up the Balenciaga status quo.
In between, there was a string of designer debuts at heritage houses, some good, some less so; the emergence of promising underground talents at labels like Eckhaus Latta and Koché; and thrilling technological coups at Chalayan and Iris van Herpen, who are showing us in real time what the clothes of the future will look like. Most significant among the season’s developments, though, was the city-spanning shift away from the minimalism that has defined fashion in recent years toward a more decorative, eccentric way of dressing, with Gucci’s Alessandro Michele leading the charge.
There’s no overestimating Michele’s influence; he’s changed fashion’s way of seeing in a matter of mere months. Individuality and authenticity are what matter now, and it’s those precise qualities that defined the season’s most important shows. Check back tomorrow for our breakdown of Spring 2016’s top trends. In the meantime, here are the season’s 12 best collections, in order from New York to Paris.
Photo: Luca Tombolini / Indigitalimages.com1/12Hood By Air
“There was a fashion movement in the ’90s called deconstructionism . . . In some ways, Hood By Air is their 21st-century successor, working to take apart conventional garments, shrinking the components, and making something new and unrecognizable out of them, using zippers and the language of bondage paraphernalia. Still, Hood By Air’s collective way of working is different, and in many ways more successfully social revolutionary than those who went before, many of whom eventually became absorbed into the commercial style of mainstream minimalism.”
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com2/12Rodarte
“Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy’s promise was realized in a head-spinningly light and complex series of collages of lace, velvet, embroidery, beading, and silk fringing, cut into Victoriana bodices and swinging gently out from small waists to touch the knee. . . . Down to the black lacy tights, down to the truly enviable gold, silver, and colored suede Deco shoes, it read as a young woman’s interpretation of what it might take to have a really good night out on the town: non-uptight dressing for maybe dancing and lounging languidly around on couches who knows where.”
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com3/12Oscar de la Renta
“It was not just a question of the breathtaking color choices, which ran from saturated to pastel . . . but also of Peter Copping’s ability to undercut froth and frills with a modernizing casualness. He did that by putting suits with jet-embroidered flat espadrilles, by tying black ribbons nonchalantly into incredible lilac and ice-blue ball gowns, and by daring to show glimpses of naked skin through black lace. In a word, it was faultless.”
Photo: Gianni Pucci / Indigitalimages.com4/12Marc Jacobs
“Nostalgia is the most powerful force in Marc Jacobs’s work. This season he indulged his insatiable, catholic tendencies: High culture (Maria Callas as Medea), low (showgirls), and things in between (Janet Leigh in Psycho) mingled on the runway. You couldn’t help but think that Andy Warhol would have appreciated it, not least of all because some of the prints were suggestive of the Pop artist’s silkscreens.”
Photo: Kim Westonarnold / Indigitalimages.com5/12J.W.Anderson
“The thing about Jonathan Anderson, at this very moment, is that he is someone possessed of the ability to jumble together unexpected ideas, and make a new sentence of them. It is the sentence that reads: ‘You didn’t know you wanted this before—but now you will!’ That, of course, is the essence of fashion—something that makes you feel a bit queasy and puzzled for a few seconds, but then, just as quickly shoots into the bloodstream as desire.”