Vegetables, cell phones, calculators, horses, a cup of coffee on a street cart, bow tie pasta, prize ribbons, caviar. These are all things that play a leading role in Rachel Antonoff’s autumn collection, in which the designer continued to explore the idiosyncratic world she has built with her eponymous label. And yet, between the easy dresses with print and the intarsia knitted sweaters and cardigans, Antonoff wanted to break new ground. “I’m particularly excited because I feel like we’ve been told for a long time that it has to be super specific: people don’t want solids from us, they just want prints,” she explained during a recent Zoom meeting. . “But people seem to really like this, and I’m really excited that we can make not only a solid, but also a black solid.”
The black plain fabric in question is a knitted set consisting of a cardigan and a wrap short with a border of petals in contrasting white. But elsewhere there was also a black dress with lots of ruffles on the shoulders – each ruffle trimmed with gold – and a pink slip dress with spaghetti straps and an empire waist. Okay, so that last dress had a champagne tower print on the front, with little pearl embroidery replacing the fizz, but it was so subtle that it actually counted as a solid—at least in Antonoff’s world.
For fall, she also expanded her categories with an artichoke and pumpkin blossom print puffer coat (calling out to all the girls who were excited about tomato girl summer!), and a toile de jouy print of characters from The sopranos. The puffer is also available in a bright metallic pink. “This is the first time we’re experimenting with solid, because people really like the printed puffers,” Antonoff said, “but I feel like if we’re going to make a solid, we have to make it shiny.”
