Christian Siriano’s psychedelic journey



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Last September, Christian Siriano brought a few dozen editors and fashion people to his Connecticut home where he launched his spring 2021 collection. It was all really inspired, luscious red dresses, so colorful for ” really ripe tomatoes ”that he had cooked with during the summer, to checkered skirts and boater hats. The latter, he wrote in the show’s notes, came from those childhood films (Clueless, Troop Beverly Hills) he had revisited as he, like many of us in quarantine, relapsed into nostalgia.

For his second pandemic show, held at Gotham Hall in New York yesterday with the same editors and fashion people, he admitted up front that this collection posed more of a challenge. “It was hard to figure out what I wanted to create this season,” he wrote in the first line of his show notes, “in a pandemic it’s hard to stay inspired in general, so I decided to dream to another world. “

He describes this world as an “alternate psychedelic reality” inspired by a recent trip to Aspen, Colorado. “Not this sort of psychedelic, ”he assures me in a post-show interview – although this The kind of psychedelia is a very hot topic at the moment – but rather, he envisioned “a strange colony of people that existed in the mountains” who dress every day and have cocktails hidden under the moon.

What would they wear? A “dreamlike” world suggests endless, fantastic, even hallucinatory possibilities. They weren’t necessarily the snakeskin bodycons, nor their black leopard-print velvet cousins. Closer were the tulle dresses, a fabric that the designer seems to be perpetually reinventing. Here they were in poisonous pink and gold, spun on the bodice in amoebic patterns. They followed a series of dresses whose shiny, ruffled skirts and sleeves were beautifully fungal.

Yet between all the mesh panels, metals, and lace corsets, the effect was less of a bizarre mountain party than a masked ball. What had a surprisingly hedonistic slant were several chunky cashmere coats, all in delicious cream wool: one with sexy side slits, the other with a long, unwieldy collar, tamed by Coco Rocha. She put it on to open the show after “waking up” in her underwear on one of the four mattresses placed in the middle of the audience.

Coco Rocha opens Siriano’s fall 2021 show.
Photo: Mike Coppola / Getty Images for Christian Siria

Speaking of these mattresses, if the goal was to draw viewers into a dream, the atmosphere of the show was surreal enough to get you there. After so long inside, being at a social event would have been enough, but add the sepulchral energy of Gotham Hall, the flashing lights and wacky music, and you walk away feeling awakened from a trip.

And while the clothes themselves don’t fully reflect the promised alternate reality, they do respond to what the designer himself imagines for post-pandemic style. “The more, the better; people get so bored of nothing, ”he says. And indeed, what the collection lacked in magic, it made up for it with pleasure. And in a world that seems to be taking its first steps towards recovery, the fun seems more than enough.

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