February 17, 2022 |
Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the most transparent designer, win! On the final day of NYFW, Collina Strada presented her AW22 collection, which doubled as an invitation to jump into a multicoloured rabbit hole of pleats, crushed velvet and metallic fabrics.
For her latest collection, the designer presented a fashion film dubbed The Collinas: a pastiche on reality-TV gems such as The Real Housewives and RuPaul’s Drag Race. The campy film follows Tommy Dorfman as an intern starting her experience at the Strada’s studio. Tommy makes a series of mistakes, including offending her colleagues with her disposable coffee cup and eating a real meat meat sandwich (someone took the words “Let’s get sickening” a bit too seriously…)
The clothes reflect this tree-hugging community utopia. There are flashy colours, shiny and velvet textures, and graphics inspired by 1970s psychedelic rock. Models, including brand muses Aaron Philips and Jazzelle Zanaughtti, come clad in a gaudy mix of Y2K cargo pants, micro-mini skirts worn over bonkers catsuits (Ashley Tisdale, eat your heart out) and zig-zagged jumpsuits with bulbous legs in cartoonish proportions.
This realm of joy and colour has reached everyday items, too. In an accompanying lookbook, models hold encrusted reusable cups, while harness buckles hang from neon belts. The layer of sarcasm present in video doesn’t mean that the sustainable ideas of Collina Strada are any less actual. The designer has long been an avid user of deadstock fabrics, and textiles made from rose bushes and stems. This is a designer crusading against climate change, one reality TV gag at a time.
Photography by Charlie Engman.
