“What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner opined.
Everything. Our relationships with clothes are personal, passionate and often complicated, just as our relationships of the human orientation. Experimental in their approach to fashion shows, Opening Ceremony’s Humberto Leon and Carol Lim opted this season for an original dance piece that traces the trajectory of a couple’s romantic relationship. The work was written and directed by Leon’s close friend Spike Jonze, whom Leon credits with coming up with the idea, and choreographed by Ryan Heffington.
“Spike and I are really close,” Leon noted. “He said, ‘You’ve got to do a piece about relationships, where the clothing tells you about the character.’” A related project: an intriguing 16-page broadsheet focused on romantic relationships. It features interviews and a photo essay with quotes of couples, from the designers’ parents to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
The dance piece will run through Friday at the La Mama Theater, with ticket sales going to Hurricane Harvey relief, a back story of particular potency since the industry performance occurred on Sunday as Hurricane Irma devastated Florida.
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“Changers: A Dance Story,” stars Mia Wasikowska and Lakeith Stanfield. It tells the story of a couple, the designers wrote in the broadsheet, “navigating the hazards of monogamy.”
The piece opens upon the two in bed, lying in familiar embrace. They awake and dress for the day, each choosing looks from portable closets on wheels. Both dress conservatively, she in girlish pleated plaid. They dance a happy, energetic duet, she frequently flexing her arm muscles, perhaps indicating a power shift in the relationship. Long and short, they hit rocky times. She’s lured by excitement and sexual experimentation; he becomes introspective, alienated. Perhaps financial issues have caused friction. He finds solace in two caring male companions. In the end, the couple reconciles, now worldlier and wiser, and more open to the other’s previously unacknowledged demons. (At least that’s one viewer’s take.)
As for the clothes, the buy-now lineup (available in two weeks) both star in and recede into the story line. The woman’s most memorable fashion moments comes in her indecision over what to wear for a night out with her provocative new friends; she rejects two big, billowy dresses in favor of a sexy black-and-white number. And for her last look, she wears a not particularly flattering jacket over leggings, suggesting emotional, and perhaps career, maturation. At one point, Stanfield goes from a suit to sweats, indicating an opposite career trajectory.
Compelling? Yes. And if onstage, performance trumps clothes, a look book shot by Brigitte Lacombe is more pure-fashion intensive. Photographed on couples, of course.