THE CLASS OF 2016: NEW DESIGNERS, PART TWO

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A close look at some of the season’s sharpest new faces dressed in the latest collections from four rising designers. Take a look at four more new designers, including the youngest ever nominee for the LVMH Prize, in the first part of this portfolio here.

MATTHEW ADAMS DOLAN

Despite a worldly education that led him to Australia, Japan, and Switzerland, the inspiration of Matthew Adams Dolan is definitively American. Having been exposed to the traditions of American craft through his mother’s quilting and needlework, Dolan was drawn to denim as a medium for its tradition and its universality—how it equally acquiesces to both labor and leisure, mass consumption and counterculture, country and hip-hop.

Through further studies at Parsons’s MFA program, Dolan played with the appeal of the material’s comfort, its unisex possibilities, and its neutrality through experimenting with oversized silhouettes worthy of Margiela. Referencing back to that American craft and its woven arts, Dolan follows the lead of the Navajo tribe, who would unravel discarded soldier uniforms and reweave them a different way. By dismantling pairs of jeans down to their threads, he can create a textile that’s completely new.

Never having intended to launch his own line, plans changed when Rihanna was pictured in i-D wearing his work. For Spring 2016, his first post-degree collection, he celebrated one of his favorite decades for denim with Nineties style wide legs, tattered flannel reinterpreted, and slouchy overalls accented with his soon-to-be-signature shredded sneakers.

PHOEBE ENGLISH

With great attention paid to forgotten construction techniques and a firm focus on handwork defining her craft, Phoebe English, of matching name and nationality, has steadily built a brand to watch since her graduation from Central Saint Martins’s master’s program in 2011. Her time spent in Paris working for a couturier at age eighteen has had a lasting affect on her design ethics and ethos, allowing fabrics to define the feel of each collection in the ways they can be warped and shredded and manipulated against their grain. The handmade textiles are created in house by English and her team, with production also under her watchful eye at London-based factories, maintaining a sustainable and responsible business, which remains important to her. After a year that included an exhibition of her design process at London’s NOW Gallery and an introduction to menswear with her first capsule collection, English’s star is on the rise under the mentorship of Comme des Garçons’s chief executive and the Dover Street Market team.

For Spring 2016, English channeled her mood of movement and transition, which she translated into disheveled, highly textured surfaces and displaced hemlines. The slashed silhouettes and torn strands signal an advance in her avant garde æsthetic.

SIKI IM

Culture and its various subsets are the driving force of creativity for designer Siki Im. Having straddled different worlds as a child of Korean immigrants living in Germany, his sensitivity to societal dichotomies translates well through his designs as he satirizes conflicts of East and West, art and subculture, man and machine. Originally a student of architecture at Oxford, Im moved to New York in 2001, where the less rigid atmosphere allowed him to easily transition and apply his universal design skills to a new medium. Fashion was more immediate and more emotional, and New York also brought the peace of belonging in a city founded by foreigners.

Self-taught in fashion, In honed his technical skills under Karl Lagerfeld and Helmut Lang before launching his eponymous menswear line in 2009. Aided by recognitions from the Ecco Domani Foundation and the Woolmark Prize, Im continues to explore conceptual menswear, produced in the United States, with goals of expanding back into spatial design.

His Spring 2016 collection amplifies the Nineties grunge of his youth with baggy jeans and slouchy staples from his “Den IM” line accessorized with hanging mix CDs and duct-tape-bound sneakers. Juxtaposing these vibrant designs with printed tailored jackets and partially tucked tops, Im masters considered construction and its undoing.

OFF-WHITE

The color of a blank canvas inspired the name for Virgil Abloh’s Off-White. Known as the creative confidant of Kanye West, collaborating on everything from album covers to stage design, Abloh developed his taste studying his favorite influences from Michael Jordan, an idol of his Chicago upbringing, to Raf Simons, an arbiter of social-commentative design in his mind, and is an avid collector of the products of both.

Off-White, launched as a menswear line in Spring 2014, aspires towards the lane of luxury streetwear, transitioning from a brand of screen-printed hoodies and flannel shirts to full-fledged men’s and women’s collections that propose an elevated approach to high/low dressing. Abloh believes that combining elements of high culture like Renaissance art with homages to skate icons like Supreme is the best way to keep streetwear from exhausting its edge as it has in decades past and avoid becoming a dated reference.

For the women’s line, Abloh communicated a modern way of dressing up for Spring by reconstructing the basic white shirt and denim uniform over and over in new ways. Through advanced bias cuts, patchwork and pleating techniques, and a helpful collaboration with Levi’s, standout looks like a denim evening dress were successfully realized. For menswear, Abloh’s anarchist appears to have graduated to the workforce by shredding up the blue-collar uniform and retailoring it for the avant garde businessman complete with chinos, overcoats, and rain slickers.