In addition to the coach show on Monday, a woman marched around topless at Park Avenue. Her semi-nakiness was a bit surprising, since the snow was still stacked on the sidewalks, but it went with the animal rights mark that she held while she shouted: “Coach Leather kill! Coach leather murders! “Nowadays you have to be quite extreme to attract people’s attention.
Perhaps that is the reason why Stuart Vevers, the creative director of the coach, and Catherine Holstein of Khaite said they thought of David Lynch, the master of the surrealistic and extreme who died last month, when compiling their collections. Well, that and the fact that fashion loves a little cinematic inspiration. Retrospectives of the most striking images of Mr. Lynch have been omnipresent. Technicolor normality that has been taken to an absurd, frightening length is currently apropos.
Not that the results of both collection were clearly Lynchian. But the shows offered the feeling that something disturbing was lurking just below the leather. And each of them had a lot of leather.
That the shows took place in the Cavernous Park Avenue Armory was a coincidence, although Mr. Lynch could say that there is no such thing.
Mrs. Holstein literally went dark and put her collection in a black circle that looked like an alien landing site that was included by a circular runway/yellow bricks away. (In a preview she said that “The Wizard of Oz” was the favorite film of Mr. Lynch, and she threw in a number of other film citations, including Merchant Ivory and the costume designer Edith Head, for good measure). From paraded models in much black with occasional shot of blood red, although it was unclear where everything led. Not to the Emerald City. Maybe “Twin Peaks.” Or “Mulholland Drive.”
Her silhouette was blouson on top and lean on the bottom. Slick Leather Great Jacks and Exaggerated Blousons mixed it with gigantic Boa Constrictor-like Breedels. Cool deconstructed corsets were invalidated to function more as small tubes that you could clean over a T-shirt, and Puff-sleeve Edwardian dresses were made again in felt wool and fraying a bit with the seams. Inexplicable, everything was accessorized with black newspaper boys caps and leather opera gloves.
The problem with the Lynch connection is that, although he was always an original, it becomes clearer with every collection that Mrs. Holstein is just … Well, is not.
Her skill is to detect how the tailor trend is to blow and digest the work of other designers in a tasty way. This season she checked all developing trend boxes, including thigh -high boots, frills and leopard, and hit notes that were previously played by Saint Laurent, The Row and Bottega Veneta. That is not necessarily a bad thing – she has many customers who appreciate the translation – but dressed in the bombast of creativity, the effect is insincere.
Mr. Vevers put his show in the New York of the 1990s, when he arrived in the city, where the walls of the Arsenal were applied with images of brick rental properties in the midst of a Lynchian melodie. They put the scene for Mr.’s band. Vevers of dissatisfied youth with a plastic neon-list sunglasses and teddy bear pocket charmes (the species that are guaranteed bestsellers).
The shrunk leather jackets were cut to show a Y2K band made of meat, and gigantic, peeing jeans (all made from reconstituted denim) were not that much low near the hips. The models looked like the remains of a rave for the whole night, in the early hours of the morning in empty streets. The feeling of dirty innocence was Lynchian, albeit the G-rated version. It was also very well done.
Everything was layered on top of the gigantic pants, which had the flow of evening skirts, including pure dresses in the 1920s in sugary pastel colors and floor length argyle sweaters in which the diamonds looked more like moth holes. Sometimes they were worn with large, fuzzy rabbits rabbits slippers. The slippers turned out to have soles so that they could be worn outside.
You wanted to take almost a few to that demonstrator, screaming in the cold.
