Latest news with #Diotima
Los Angeles Times
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
At the Fashion Trust U.S. Awards, everyone understood the assignment
The Fashion Trust U.S. Awards? You kind of had to be there. After the point in the ceremony when Natasha Beddingfield sang 'Unwritten' at the top of her lungs, the entire room overtaken by euphoric nostalgia, moving and singing in her reflection, host Keke Palmer correctly retorted: 'Why do we all go up for that song?' One: Because it's a classic. Two: Because it's filled with hope, pointing us to what's next. The same could be said about the third annual Fashion Trust U.S. Awards, a perfectly extra affair celebrating emerging designers on Wednesday evening. The dress code cryptically read 'Fashion.' But the assignment was understood, and L.A., it seemed, was grateful for the opportunity to dress up. Artists, designers, stylists, actors and musicians came out from all corners of the industry, posing on the red carpet and dancing to the sounds of Star Amerasu, the evening's DJ. Julia Fox was there in Marni. Laverne Cox in archival Jean Paul Gaultier. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez wore Willy Chavarria. Gabrielle Union, Taraji P. Henson, Kimora Lee Simmons, Kerry Washington, Fergie, Kehlani and many others made an appearance as well. The sit-down dinner consisted, brilliantly, of cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets with caviar, truffle fries and Caesar salad, before the ceremony kicked off with remarks from the Fashion Trust U.S. founder Tania Fares and the board. Fashion editor, stylist and board member Carlos Nazario gave a moving speech about the ways fashion not only changed his life but is his life. 'I'm a kid from Queens, New York,' he said to a roaring applause. 'Not Ray Romano-Fran Drescher Queens. I mean, like, Mobb Deep-Nas-50 Cent Queens. … I often wondered if the success I imagined was ever possible for someone like me. And yet, through a f— load of hard work and maybe a little bit of luck, fashion and the sense of purpose it gave me has allowed me to not only occupy rooms like these but feel at home in them, feel valuable in them and feel seen in them.' The Ready-to-Wear Award was presented by Stephanie Horton of Google Shopping and Law Roach — who announced with a hair flip that he was un-retiring and taking up styling again full-time. The award went to Rachel Scott of Diotima, the brand drawing from handmade techniques and Scott's Jamaican roots. Lauren Parrish and Mandy West of St. John presented the Graduate Award to Patrick Taylor, whose whimsical knitwear brand is inspired by the designer's vintage family photographs. Actor Colman Domingo, in a glittering turquoise suit, presented the Accessories Award to Dani Griffiths of hat brand Clyde. Musician and mononymous icon Ciara presented the Jewelry Award to Rebecca Zeijdel-Paz of Beck. Kate Hudson presented Nana Kwame Adusei of Kwame Adusei with the Sustainability Award, and in his speech Adusei talked about the importance of working your way up from the bottom in this industry. As the grand finale, Hailey Bieber presented Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello with the inaugural Honorary Award. What's next for these designers? To start, a total of $500,000 divided among the award winners and mentorship opportunities from Google Shopping and Fashion Trust U.S. members. But as Beddingfield might say, the rest is still unwritten.
Wall Street Journal
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Five Outfits That Show Where Fashion Is Headed
New York Fashion Week is a quieter affair these days, with major draws such as The Row choosing to show in Paris again, and others such as Proenza Schouler skipping the runway this season. But for those who braved the snow flurries to schlep from South Street Seaport to Madison Avenue, there were plenty of rewards, from promising young designers Diotima and Colleen Allen to solid showings from stalwarts including Coach and Michael Kors. Look closely at individual looks and you'll see bellwethers of the state of fashion. Here are five prescient outfits that indicate what we'll be wearing—and even thinking about—come fall. Fforme, a minimalist startup launched in 2022, has quickly developed a cult following for its pure luxury pieces for working women. This floor-length, navy wool-silk opera coat, with 60 meters of hand-frayed ribbon, is the kind of forever item that's both modest and sensational. It would be a beautiful gift for a high-school graduate or her grandmother. 'Comfort is luxurious,' said the brand's new creative director Frances Howie of the piece, and it could be worn as easily over a T-shirt and jeans as an evening gown.
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
It's a Man's World. So How Should a Woman Dress in It?
At the finale of the Thom Browne show, the last show of New York Fashion Week, a model appeared in a jacket encrusted with gold bullion, worn atop 130 feet of swathed tweed and many layers of crinolines. The skirt was so elaborate, with so many tiers and drapes, it hindered her movement, as if she were weighed down by all the girlish expectations. To a certain extent, designers are always wrestling with the tropes of femininity — playing with them, embracing them, subverting them, dosing them with irony — but such choices seem much more freighted in the dawn light of trad wives, Barstool Sports and Hulk Hogan. What it means to dress like a woman in the era of the 'manosphere' was the central question of this past New York Fashion Week. When macho posturing is on the rise, do you lean into ruffles and lace and corsets and hobble skirts? Do you play the fainting flower or the sex kitten? The princess in the tower or the pinup? Or do you do something entirely different? Do you think, for example, of 'the matriarch,' like Rachel Scott, the founder and designer of Diotima? Ms. Scott's collection was for the multitasker of all multitaskers, running the household and the family and the budget. Over the last few months, Ms. Scott said she felt Black women, but also all women, had been 'reduced, really flattened' and denied 'nuance, complexity and sensuality.' So she decided to offer it to them in her signature mix of tailoring and crochet work. Giant fringy knit lapels burst forth from suit jackets, which covered openwork tunics or tanks of crystal mesh, and suit trousers were swapped for silk bloomers. Bloomers? 'The first feminist undergarments,' Ms. Scott called them, and though they can read as retrograde, here they looked surprisingly good, kind of like the precursor to sweatpants. Her ability to find the harmony, not merely the tension, in the juxtaposition of kitchen-table craft and C-suite uniform is, in part, what made her the Council of Fashion Designers of America designer of the year in 2024. But that was just one option for expressing identity. There were others. What was notably missing, however, were women presented as obviously sexualized objects; snacks to enjoy. Femininity as a Fungible Concept There were women as furious survivors (or maybe just Furies) at Elena Velez, where a story of shipwrecks and sea creatures was woven into cracked cotton shirting and cool pirate trousers, latex-dipped nighties that clung to the body and dresses dripping tentacles of poisonous green. Anna Delvey, the society scammer whose story was made into a streaming series, opened the show in an oily skirt and ankle bracelet, but such stunts (like an earlier Velez mud-wrestling show or a runway dressed up as a treatise on 'Gone With the Wind') are sophomoric distractions, obscuring Ms. Velez's very real talent. Her clothes are a scream into the void all on their own. That's one way to be heard. Another was at Luar, where Raul Lopez called his show 'El Pato,' which is Spanish for duck and, he said in a preview, a homosexual slur hurled at him as a teenager because of the way he walked. He wanted to reclaim the label and turn it into a thing of glory for … well, whomever. He did that via puffers filled with feathers or bristling with them; jackets cut to rise up on either side of the throat like wings or to drop off one shoulder; and grandiose, 1980s silhouettes: big shoulders, barrel pants. The point: Your finery is your business. (It was a better point, anyway, than the bodysuits made with hoods that lifted the arms into a limp-wrist position, which were a little on the nose.) That may seem like a cop-out, the fashion equivalent of the trite adage that women can be anything they want to be, but it's also a point worth remembering. Femininity is a fungible concept. That's not a problem; it's an opportunity. Sportswear as a Provocation Still, perhaps the most ubiquitous idea of all was women as executives. Women in control. Well, of course: This is New York. As Michael Kors said before his show of slouchy, swishy trouser suits and oversize shirting, when it comes to sportswear: 'Let's be honest. We invented this.' True, it's not exactly a surprise from Mr. Kors. But in the context of the moment, his refusal to equate sexy with see-through read less as boring and more as provocative. 'Hands in the pockets, covered up,' he said. 'In a weird way, that's subversive.' He wasn't wrong. Nor was he alone in the thought. Brandon Maxwell elevated separates to the status of jackets and ties: highly polished, but not matchy-matchy banker stripes and Prince of Wales checks. Christopher John Rogers mixed burgundy and black suiting with his brightly striped dancing dresses. Tory Burch called her collection 'twisted sportswear.' 'I feel like women are defining 'classic' for themselves rather than having it defined for them,' Ms. Burch said backstage. Her new classics: cardigans with the sleeves sliced open, so one could be draped across the body and pinned in place, and a cropped leather jacket that was outfitted with all the pockets (credit-card holder, billfold, coin purse) of a handbag. A draped cocktail dress dangled marabou rabbit tails, as if for good luck. Even at Carolina Herrera, where the designer Wes Gordon was inspired by the idea of a garden, the triteness of women-as-flowers in rose-bedecked minidresses and blue-sky lace (looks that are sure to move like hot cakes in Palm Beach) was offset by the cooler contrast of a strategic gold tulip on, say, a gray pinstriped jumpsuit. 'It's more tailoring than I've ever done,' Mr. Gordon said backstage, and it gave his collection an oomph that made the last billowing opera coat look like a superhero's cape. Up, up and away. Still, no one does tailoring like Mr. Browne, who set his collection amid a host of 2,000 origami white birds meant to represent, he said in a preview, 'hope.' Before his extravaganza of a finale dress, there was a flock of heritage tweeds remade as oversize coats and exacting jackets; pleated skirts, with hemlines high and low; and narrow trousers, often marked with avian intarsia and mixed with old school gingham, varsity letters and rep tie silks. No two looks were the same, though every once in a while an hourglass dress would appear, sprouting tulle ruffles from the back but so structured from the front, it looked like a cage. They made the rest of the collection seem like a jail break.
