Before the advent of the Bryant Park tents in the early 1990s, New York designers put on shows in their showrooms, swapping rolling racks and mannequins for chairs and prepping models in back offices. By returning to his own Woolworth Building headquarters for his last two shows, today’s included, Joseph Altuzarra has reminded us of what American fashion lost over the last few decades as it corporatized and traded intimacy and individuality for spectacle and social media impact.
Individuality, along with femininity and defiance, were Altuzarra’s talking points this season. He’s moved away from thematic collections—“she’s in Morocco,” or “she’s a Hitchcock heroine”—in favor of something that hits closer to home. As he described it last time, it’s just “much more about pieces” that he feels “interested in developing.”
The risk with this approach is that a seasonal message can start to feel diffuse, but there were distinctive things here and exemplary versions of other ideas that have been percolating in the general atmosphere. The attractive navy cape coat that opened the show, for instance, belongs in the latter category. It seems like just about everyone has a version of a cape coat at the moment; what made Altuzarra’s unique is that it looks like a cape, but is actually constructed with sleeves, rendering it a far more practical garment. Meanwhile, a pair of evening dresses in printed chiffon were made distinctive by the matching shawls that were draped and swirled about the shoulders. They may have been influenced by a red carpet hit in the 1990s—Uma Thurman in lavender Prada, to be precise—but they’re not something that has otherwise been in the air of late, and they had a lot of feminine allure.
Altuzarra has made a custom of giving books to all his guests, clipping images to the pages that reference the collection on the runway. This season, it was Wuthering Heights, the Emily Brontë classic that’s being adapted for the big screen by Emerald Fennell. Some things just have a way of circling back around.
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