Fleeting beauty, youth, love: It may sound like a Lana Del Rey song, but it’s actually Frank Sinatra. Jin Kay, one half of Commission with Dylan Cao, explained that the 1967 Sinatra hit, “The World We Knew,” reverberated in the back of the designers’ minds this season. It makes sense: Much of Commission examines styles from the ’60s and ’80s in today’s context. It makes sense, too, that these two millennial designers are feeling a type of way about our present moment: that they see their youth as fleeting, that the world they grew up in is not one they recognize.
If it’s one very tall order to capture in a fashion collection, Cao and Kay seemed up to the challenge. Hanging in their Parisian showroom was an eggnog-colored dress. A delightfully weird little concoction, it was equal parts Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lower East Side 20-something circa 2025, its prairie ruffles cascading between two extra sets of sleeves and its mini-length hem fraying.
This brand of design—of abstracting and subverting the kinds of pieces that would otherwise fall to the back of our closets—has become a familiar one in fashion over the past decade. Yet Cao and Kay’s ability to distort even the most familiar of silhouettes has made their clothes stand out. Compared to their previous outings, however, this collection evoked a certain angst. It’s less romantic than past lineups, a little harder edged.
Dry-cleaning tags as finishing touches turned up here and there. Kay said it was about a desire to “preserve”—this idea of future-proofing clothing and, by extension, life. There were many details visible in the showroom that are harder to discern in this look book: the way Cao and Kay captured frozen movement by tacking down draping details or imitated the effects of the passing of time by shrinking shirts and trousers or rendering a slip in two tones of white fabric, one slightly yellowed. “Over and over, I keep going over the world we knew,” sings Sinatra in that song, “that inconceivable, that unbelievable world we knew.”
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