Spooky season is almost upon us and fashion’s favorite mystic Colleen Allen is right on cue. There were Halloween-y undertones to her spring collection with graveyard black and ghostly white gowns in various states of deshabille accented by pops of purple and pumpkin orange. But what makes Allen a name to know is that her historic references can be both sinister and romantic without ever approaching costume.
In fact, Allen has upped her credibility on the red carpet lately with best-dressed placements on young Hollywood royalty like Mikey Madison and Ayo Edebiri. “The women who are attracted to the work, I think, are really powerful figures in culture, so to be able to see it in those big spaces is really satisfying,” she said via a Zoom call.
As Allen continues to gain more exposure, where to draw the line between the public and private self and how to dress for one’s self versus a man, another woman or the entire world became questions she grappled with. “I started thinking about how women used to have these wardrobes for domestic life that were really intimate, only for their husbands, and sort of the bizarreness of that and the darkness of it,” she explained. Allen found a kindred tortured spirit in Sylvia Plath after reading her biography, saying “she’s so romantic and poetic, but there’s always that tension there.”
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Moving away from the structured tailoring of fall, Allen said she wanted to “get close to the body, to be softer and more vulnerable,” and in doing so hoped to subvert the expectations of female sexuality and “dismantle the fantasy.”
Her “centerpiece” is an orange cloak in floral silk jacquard. Completely swaddling the model’s body in the look book, it left everything to the imagination, while the other centerpiece — a scanty lace bandeau bra over a floor-length slip skirt — left very little to it.
Innerwear as outerwear walked many a runway this week, but Allen’s take felt less like it’s for putting on a show, inspired by her vintage collection spanning the 1920s to the ‘60s when shape-wear and lingerie were thought of more for practicality. But today, with naked dressing all the rage, few would second guess leaving the bedroom in a witchy semi-sheer caftan with a gaping keyhole or walking the street in her girdle-capri hybrid worn with an 18th-century frock jacket.
And they shouldn’t, since Allen’s work demands to be seen.