February 26, 2024 |
Paying it forward is important if you’re sitting at the apex of luxury fashion. Dolce and Gabbana do it with their ongoing ‘supported by’ project which sponsors young designers to show at Milan Fashion Week. Charging Katie Grand with sourcing the talent, and then providing not just textiles and materials, but the keys to its HQ at via Broggi 23 for each cohort to host the show, this season they set their sights on beloved London fashion fixture, Feben.
Calling the collection Speed, Feben’s vision for AW24 came zooming down the runway with all the vivid textures and electrifying hues we’ve come to expect from the NewGen alum. She crafted her clothes in response to working at the incredible speed expected of designers nowadays. “I was thinking how quickly you have to make a collection,” she said in a release. “You might use duct-tape if you did not have much around. It is ugly, but I thought, just let me find something beautiful in it! I was inspired when I stumbled on how Isa Genzken had fun making duct-tape stripes in colours.” That reference to duct-tape arrived in the form of slinky dresses and bodysuits that used the adhesive tool along with coloured paper to make tiger-stripe prints that pulled from D&G’s animal-obsessed ‘90s archives.
Elsewhere, her signature twisted textiles were rendered in crushed velvet for the first time and the upcycled plastic beadwork that decorated chaps, jewellery and bags was created by Ghanian artisans. There were also colossal puffer coats and halter-neck dresses with multicolour fringes that swung with every step. Spiky (but not punk) shift dresses were inspired by the artist Simone Yvette Leigh’s spike dress statue. The collection was cleaner, sexier, more mature; exemplifying what a season in Milan (and with D&G) can do for a designer.
Photography courtesy of Feben.
