A CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist has Melitta Baumeister in her sights, and the spring season provided an opportunity to introduce her work to a wider audience. The designer cleverly took advantage of a kind of inventory setup, consisting of many familiar silhouettes.
Baumeister is a brave creator of shapes, some of them extreme: see look one, a snake-inspired dress made from quilted tubes, and 15, a phallic-looking number that puzzles together horseshoe hoops with ball ends. (Regular silver metallic versions of this on T-shirts are a recent addition to the brand’s repertoire.) Bananas have been part of the brand’s iconography for years, and this season one appears in bag form. (The fruit also appeared at Puppets and Puppets.) Newer and surprisingly cute was a mini bag with an inverted bow and matching platform shoes.
For spring, variants of the brand’s tent and inverted tulip shapes were available, as were its pleated fabrics and volumes, which derive their structure from foam. Baumeister believes in the power of fashion to transform your day, your mood and your life, and she tried to convey that message through a presentation and a video. “You might think that Melitta Baumeister is purely a black and white brand. Perception is our most unreliable sense because it can be so easily changed. What you see is not always what you get. Can something so voluminous be easy to wear? It seems impossible, but here it is,” are some lines from the script.
Baumeister makes clothes that have a big impact, but most of them have their basis in good old American sportswear. She just added foam to the sleeves of a T-shirt dress, or to a super-sized shirt waist using the same technique. She has translated her volumes into flowing denim (and tracksuits) and anticipated the JNCO revival moment we are experiencing now. Last season, Baumeister introduced hand-painted jeans that evoke the feeling of Warhol’s screen prints. They are great and, she says, a commercial success. The recent addition of sportier elements (see spring’s orange topper) helps balance the line’s apparent fantasy.
Complementing the brand’s signature pleats, new parachute ruffles have been added, punctuated by bands of transparent filament. Although Norma Kamali was not a reference, it recalled that designer’s popular parachute style. Like Cecilie Bahnsen, Baumeister has introduced jackets that take into account the volumes they need to cover. Wavy lines are part of the brand vocabulary and this season they took an additional shape: a headless snake print, created with the help of AI. It worked best when applied to pieces of mesh, creating a tattoo effect. Because Baumeister’s designs have an inherent graphic quality, the overlay of patterns on them is more distracting than enhancing, and has the potential to hinder her goals. “What I really want is for people to understand the garments,” she said during a studio visit. If you can get past the snakes, it’s doable.
