You don’t need Henry Zankov to tell you that this season he was thinking about “seduction by color.” One look at the sleek, short-sleeved maxi dress with thick stripes of turquoise and tangerine orange is enough to make your knees weak. “This season I wanted it to go further; I still wanted to use color to bring you forward, but I also wanted to show the body a little more through stitches, through new techniques, and also through new silhouettes,” he explained. Walking through the gallery space that housed Zankov’s fall presentation felt a bit like being at an illegal party: a barely visible yellow knit sweater with airbrushed details in tropical green and azure blue; a midi dress with long sleeves and sheer stripes alternating with red-orange and pink-pink stripes; a tank top in blue, black, green and yellow vertical stripes, worn with a matching, but not skirt in the same color and pattern, except he swapped the yellow stripe for white. It was as bacchanal as color and texture can be. Some color names this season were rhodolite, chrysocolla, sunstone, hydrangea blue and bergamot yellow.
“The collection is called ‘Lighten Up,’ so I wanted the color to feel light and glow from within,” Zankov said. “I wanted to make everything as light as possible by using open stitches or light yarns.” Zankov has experimented with woven fabrics in previous collections, and this time he really landed on some beautiful shirt pieces. These included a shirt with stripes of varying widths and shades of blue and yellow, and a pair of truly amazing long shorts made from a shirt tied around the waist in red, green and blue striped fabric. A white cotton jacket with a retro stripe detail on the chest and matching cargo pants looked right at home among the more colorful options.
Zankov also expanded his ‘womenswear’ offering with dresses suitable for different occasions, such as an open weave orange sleeveless tank dress decorated with blue sequins, and a decadent long cream dress with an open weave design and horizontal stripes in yellow, black. , green and red. (Though at its core, Zankov’s clothes are for anyone who is attracted to them; he called them “feminine progressive but gender fluid.”)
Zankov’s artistic collaboration this season was with Britain’s Helen Bullock, whose illustrations of fruit appeared on a number of pieces in the collection, including a tank with a cherry on top and the word ‘Ripe’ written underneath. “It’s a bit of an innuendo without being too obvious,” he said with a sly smile.
