February 20, 2019 |
Forget about those awkwardly-sized mini bottles of Evian water. Guests at the Hanger presentation were greeted with a mock-up cannabis farm. Ganja plants, courtesy of Boiler Room’s video platform 4:3, dance across a screen, which formed the backdrop of the collection. Stare long enough and your vision becomes hazy. Hanger’s muse for the season? Miss Mary Jane.
Cleverly dubbed ‘High Altitude’, their on-schedule debut collection wants you to go green in more ways than one. “I really love weed, it’s very key to my life” designer Claire Yurika Davis explained. “I wanted to make a collection which was about weed and psychedelia, whilst also looking at the sustainability of cannabis as a plant and working that into fabric.” Being environmentally conscious runs in tandem to Hanger’s erogenous exploration of fetishised materials; her signature speciality is latex. Slip dresses, skirts sliced at the thigh and a wraparound cami top (the latter clung to the body by a drawstring) were constructed out of hemp fabric, dyed and coated to imitate a latex-like texture. One skin-tight, translucent skirt is quite fittingly hand-dyed with marijuana leaf motifs.
The slinky silhouettes were completely covetable and club-ready, akin to the make-do dress ethos of that garage girl. Quilted ribbed separates in muted browns and grass greens stand out as perfect for smoking area flaunting. Some looks also had more than one purpose. A nylon poncho transforms into a tent, whilst another garment turns from a cape into a sleeping bag. “We’re just having a massive revolution at the moment but a lot of people are hijacking that, like boring white people doing really dead things,” Davis says post-show. Hanger are here to make sustainability sensual, one carbon kush-print at a time.
Photos by Anna Miyoshi.
