Last September, Christian Siriano brought a few dozen editors and fashion people to his home in Connecticut, where he debuted his spring 2021 collection. The whole thing looked seriously inspired, from the lush red dresses, so colorful to the “really tomatoes with which he had cooked during the summer, in plaid skirts and boat hats. The latter, he wrote in the program notes, came from those children’s films (Clueless, Troop Beverly Hills) he was revisiting while he, like many of us quarantined, fell in nostalgia.
For his second pandemic show, held yesterday at New York’s Gotham Hall with the same editors and fashion people, he admitted straight away that this collection posed a greater challenge. “It’s been hard to find out what I wanted to create this season,” he wrote in the first line of his program notes, “in a pandemic, it’s hard to be inspired in general, so I decided to dream of another world.”
He describes this world as an “alternative psychedelic reality” inspired by a recent trip to Aspen, Colorado. “No what psychedelic, ”he assures me in a post-show interview, although what kind of psychedelia is a very fashionable topic now – but instead, he envisioned “a strange colony of people who existed in the mountains” who dressed up every day and made cocktails hidden under the moon.
What do they wear? A “dreamlike” world suggests infinite, fantastic and even hallucinatory possibilities. It wasn’t necessarily the snakeskin bodycons, nor their black leopard print velvet cousins. Closer were the tulle dresses, a fabric that the designer always seems to reinvent. Here they were in poisonous pink and gold, spun on the bodice in amoebic patterns. They followed a series of dresses whose shiny skirts and sleeves and ruffles looked splendidly fungal.
Still, among all the mesh, metallic panels and lace corsets, the effect was less of a bizarre mountain party than a masquerade. What had a surprisingly hedonistic bias were several thick cashmere coats, all in delicious cream wool: one with sexy side slits, the other with a long, heavy collar, tamed by Coco Rocha. She dressed him to open the show after ‘waking up’ in his underwear on one of the four mattresses placed in the middle of the audience.
Coco Rocha opens Siriano’s autumn 2021 show.
Photo: Mike Coppola / Getty Images for Christian Siria
Speaking of these mattresses, if the goal was to pull viewers into a dream, the atmosphere of the show was surreal enough to get there. After so much time indoors, being at a social event would have been enough, but add Gotham Hall’s sepulchral energy, flashing lights and delirious music, and you leave feeling like you have woken up from a trip.
And while the clothes themselves don’t fully convey the promised alternative reality, they do find what the designer himself envisions for the post-pandemic style. “The more, the better; people are so bored out of nowhere, ”he says. And, in fact, what the collection lacked in magic, it made up for in fun. And in a world that seems to be taking its first steps towards recovery, the fun seems more than enough.