Collection Notes
Rude Boy - Hold Your Own Hand. “There were the artists and then there were the ‘dames,’” said abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner of the New York art scene. “I was considered a ‘dame’ even if I was a painter too.” Krasner, who was married to Jackson Pollock, is just one of many women artists whose work has been obscured by comparison to their male counterpart. Did they subordinate their own artistic ambitions to their husbands’? I used the stories of female artists—Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, June Newton A.K.A. ALICE Springs—to lead the narrative for this season’s menswear-inspired women’s ready-to-wear collection. There is an understated elegance to their day-to-day uniforms—I could easily imagine what these women would be wearing as they came and went from their studios—which gave way to a number of this season’s key additions: new classically-cut knitwear pieces including a grey ribbed knit polo jumper as well as two gauzy mohair sweaters offered in a vest-inspired tank top as well as a boxy cardigan. The Academy New York also welcomes a dark and moody floral print into the range—available in reworked workwear-riding pants, a reversible quilted jacket, and a waistcoat, as well as cummerbund and bow tie accessories that put a clever twist on traditional dinner dressing when paired with slim-fit single and double-breasted club jackets in hunter green houndstooths and Prince of Wales. TANY also welcomes skirts for the first time in two different shapes: the first, a technical nylon-meets-floral cotton blended pleated knee grazer and the other, and the other, minis offered in a fuzzy muted mohair tartan as well as a supple suede in juniper green. I think when you look back at gender-bending fashion, you see what has really dominated that conversation is the suit. That’s where the incendiary and prodigious poet, painter, and musician Lizzy Mercier Descloux comes in. More commonly known as a footnote to the careers of icons like Patti Smith and Chet Baker, the late French singer was a visionary in her own right who encapsulated limitless post-punk ideals. almost exclusively in some form of a suit or a two piece—her androgynous look and mannish partiality for oversized shirting, suit trousers, and boxy jackets—her outfits were as much mannish as they were insouciantly Parisian. For me, all of these women, each iconic in their own rite, weaves together a silent yet resounding rebel yell of the rude boy spirit echoed in each and every piece’s slimmed-down silhouette. This is clothing made in celebration of individualism and anti-establishmentarian attitudes because at the end of the day we only have ourselves to have and to hold.