Alex McEACHIN was growing up in Richmond, va. (1958) and the Tartan ensembles worn by Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless” (1995). For a while she considered a career in costume design, but after having worked a few school productions, she realized that she was less interested in interpreting the concept of a director than in coming up with her own. To that end, she moved to New York, where she obtained a diploma at the Parsons School of Design in 2017 and landed a job in product development at the fashion brand Proenza Schouler. There, for seven years, she acted as a contact person between designers and producers, who reconsider ideas in finished pieces and, she says, acquire an “almost doctoral level of education in fashion”. Now she applies that knowledge to her own creative vision: Accorda, an artistic but deeply portable model line that was launched in February.
McEACHIN, who is 30 and lives in the Chelsea district in New York, took the name of her brand from an Italian word that roughly translates into ‘Harmonie’. It is a suitable name for a line that balances asthetics gracefully. Streamlined silhouettes, including slender sliced dresses and tailor -made jumpsuits, are steeped in dramatic flowering like a wide, wavy collar and folds that blow from a side seam. Sporty and work clothing-inspired details appear in festive clothing, including a berry-colored viscose dress with a zipper in the front and collected neckline that channeled a hoodie; A black lurex dress with floor length with exaggerated arm holes that reminds a muscle plants; And a strapless black tweed jumpsuit with oval recesses that reminds a few overalls.
Although McEACHIN avoid stretchable substances, since they ‘too easy’, encourage her smooth clothing movement – Reportingly, the dancer-choreographers Gregory Hines and Trisha Brown influenced her senior thesis collection in Parsons. Threading with what she calls ‘informal glamor’, her pieces are also built for city life. As McEACHIN says: “There is nothing you can’t take the train.” She called her first offer of the dinner because, she says, she imagines that her friends are wearing the clothes to such a meeting, with her acting as host in jeans and the Black Lurex bomber of the collection. “You walk in and there is an immediate response,” she says about the textured, light dot jacket. “Everyone wants to touch or try it, but it is in no way delicate.”
Her relationships within the industry were also a driving force. While at Proenza Schouler she spent weeks every season with visiting European factories and studios, problems with solving problems arising with samples and binding, she says, “with the people thinking of the beads and painful about a button.” Now some of the same detailed makers work on her brand. And although she is smart about how the landscape has changed since the founders of Proenza Schoumer, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, arrived on stage in the early 2000s – nowadays everything is more expensive, more branded and more digital – she hopes that she can be part of the next generation of New York Fashion. Opening a physical store in Chelsea in the next five years is an important goal. “I still believe,” she says, “that it is possible.”
Models: Aliza Jarmon at Society Management and Gracen Wilkens at Supreme Management. Casting by Ricky Michiels. Hair: Jadis Jolie at Edma Makeup: Grace Ahn on day one with the help of Nars Cosmetics. Production by Shay Johnson Studio
