The greatest fashion related theory of everything is captured in WB Yeats’s phrase “perne in a gyre,” from his poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” He suggests that history unfolds in a pattern like that of a gyrating bobbin in a spinning mill, a DNA-like coned helix: everything repeats infinitely, but with infinite micro-variation.
This was also the thrust of Susan Fang’s collection logic this season. She said: “History seems to be repeating itself. We think about infinity but it’s in the shape of a loop… Since we grew up we were taught to have this goal to work hard—kind of this capitalist world—but now I feel that our world is having a lot of challenges. There is a lot of sadness happening. So we’re wondering whether it’s time to question what caused this.”
This rationale lent Fang coherent license to hop back and forth across history, plucking silhouettes from the 19th century, the mid-20th century, and the 21st century. She also flitted between contexts, presenting bridal-leaning looks and ballet tutus against daywear swathed in ski-sourced, sculpturally arranged down-filled panels. What connected them all was the aesthetic of ethereality she tried to conjure through the opaque lightness of her chiffon, tulle, and resin materials, and the cutesy, slightly saccharine sentiment telegraphed by the pastel color story and the plentiful use of embellishments shaped after lucky clover flowers, peach blossoms, and bows.
The most notable bow sat enormously on the head of a model wearing a dress of line-linked resin butterflies that were designed to flutter around the body as she walked and which Fang said had taken more than a month to make. Combined with Fang’s 3D printed ballerinas, lug-soled jellies, and the commercial EDM breakdown playing over the show it made me think of a mid-aughts Vegas dance party: kawaii sci-fi. This cleverly conceived collection was packed with pretty possibilities for Fang followers to factor into their future wardrobes.