Community, friendships, relationships, shared ideals – themes underscoring this Fashion Week’s activities and events. At Creatures of the Wind, Shane Gabier and Christopher Peters took the motifs one step further, in conversation at least. “We started looking at places of belonging, commune living and, I guess, cults, too,” Peters said backstage before the show. “Not, like the negative aspect, but the idealistic.”
Whether it’s personal ideology or just an age thing that makes it difficult for some to grasp the upside of cults, as it turned out, no clear (nor even vague) connection came through on the runway. The designers did telegraph community and inclusion via their casting, which featured some friends as well as models. The young women all made perfect sense together on the runway — and walked really well, no one suffering visibly from a lack of confidence.
Peters mentioned, too, inspiration in that most traditional of fashion standards — glamour. “We looked at what glamour actually means and how far can you take it before it becomes unintelligible — not wrong, but just different,” he said. That concept emerged more plainly as the designers employed elements of classic glamour — waist emphasis, embellishments, lavish fabrics, fur — working them into a lineup that was pretty, practical and still interesting.
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Gabier and Peters opened with two coats and a dress in bold fabrics — a “Screaming People” silk jacquard; bright orange wool — worn over printed, see-through plissé slips. Vintage furs were turned inside out, reshaped and then embroidered with crystals in modernist abstract meanderings. In fact, outerwear was one of the lineup’s primary elements. Neatly proportioned coats with unfastened belts that fell long and loose on one side worked the no-nonsense side of lady, while bombers and motorcycle jackets, including one in flamboyant Kelly green, projected a bit of bad-girl attitude. Every now and then, the designers reconsidered such classics. One look, for example, featured the pleasantly odd juxtaposition of a wool plaid dress over a Fair Isle sweater. Such moves allowed Peters and Gabier to reference the charming idiosyncrasy on which they built Creatures of the Wind’s reputation, while continuing to move in a more commercial direction.