Raf Simons presented yesterday during New York Fashion Week the second installament of his American "experiment" at Calvin Klein.
We don't know yet if this will be a trilogy or a series, but that explains the reason why the S/S 18 collection featured quite a few themes from last season.
Like the previous show, the new collection – presented at the brand's West 39th Street headquarters, located in the former Garment District – opened with cowboy shirts.
This time they came in a shiny satin rather than matte cotton fabric, and the collection then progressed with a series of designs – from separates to dresses – with large prints of black and white photographs.
Their style was very reminiscent of Simons' photocollages in his own S/S 2017 menswear collection that featured, as you may remember, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, and also called to mind the S/S 18 designs with prints from Peter Saville's archives.
Calvin Klein's collection featured instead Andy Warhol's black and white prints of knives and of Dennis Hopper. The images from Warhol’s "Death and Disaster" series were instead printed on sleeveless cotton dresses trapped in a layer of see-through plastic (a trick we saw in the previous collection as well…).
Coats splashed with red paint explored the American horror theme more in depth, calling to mind visions of Sissy Spacek's blood-soaked Carrie in Brian de Palma's film, but also hinted at blood and at graphically and visually shocking films and series (think about American Horror Story or American Gods).
Red coats and a red dress in a light parachute-like fabric (actually it was made with the waterproof nylon used for tents) called to mind the attire of the young girl/assassin dwarf in the 1973 thriller-horror film Don't Look Now directed by Nicolas Roeg.
A white virginal dress matched with red boots and donned by a model with a chopped hairstyle brought back visions of Mia Farrow in her white nightgown and pale blue dressing gown in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby.
Murder was evoked by the models wearing light nylon dresses and coats, a material that called to mind bin bags, and at times carrying an American quilt (American quilted motifs also appeared in the jackets and coats from the previous Calvin Klein collection).
Yet the quilts were not references to traditions or to the Prairie Home Companion but pointed at quilts as ideal items to wrap up a corpse (that you can then dispose in a black bin bag maybe, Simons seemed to say?).
There was a sort of 1950s mood in the long skirts and couture silhouettes, but the models on the runway surely weren't elegant Hitchcock ladies: the rubber suits in yellow and teal with long pink or maroon gloves with the message "Made in Ohio, Industrial dip molded, 100% Nirile/Synthetic rubber" evoked Vera Farmiga in Bates Motel scrubbing blood from the floor in her yellow rubber gloves (one question remains: there has been an abudance of plastic and rubber in the first two Calvin Klein collections, you wonder how many of these items will actually be produced and if they will easily deteriorate or change colours).
Cheerleaders are a great American tradition, but here they didn't evoke college days or porn à la Debbie Does Dallas.
There's actually a great tradition of horror films featuring the iconic pompom waving girls – from Greydon Clark's Satan's Cheerleaders (1977) to Fran Rubel Kuzui's Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1992) and Lucky McKee, Chris Sivertson's All Cheerleaders Die (2013) passing through John Quinn's Cheerleader Camp (1988).
The horror theme continued therefore in the pieces referencing cheerleaders: pompoms were used to create bags or oversized keychain-like accessories (think about Prada's chatelaine, but picture it as a massive pompom and add to it a couple of bottle of fragrance…). At the very end of the show the pompoms were transformed into long fringes for deconstructed flapper dresses.
Apart from the pompom bags, the accessory offer included high-heeled shoes splattered with red paint, red shoes and boots (a great horror element from Andersen's "Red Shoes" to Kim Yong-gyun's Bunhongsin's eponymous film) and white pumps with strategical holes and the same colour scheme of the infamous hockey mask from the Friday The 13th series.
The horror mood was also part of the set by Sterling Ruby: college marching band fringes and cheerleaders' pompoms dangled from the ceiling together with buckets and axes (references to the prom scene in Carrie and The Shining's "Here's Johnny" scene?).
So far Simons seems to have produced collections in which he has remixed his own views with Prada's provocations and Margiela's conceptualism, without generating an entirely new fashion semantics.
Yes, the American horror tropes were well dissected in this collection, but the theme wasn't certainly an innovative one: horror has always been a part of fashion ever since Italian poet and writer Giacomo Leopardi wrote in 1824 the "Dialogo della Moda e della Morte", a short dialogue in which Fashion and Death are portrayed as sisters, born of transience and intent on transforming human beings.
In more recent decades, Dario Argento directed the A/W 1986-87 Trussardi fashion show in which he borrowed moods and scenes from Suspiria and in the last few years we looked at advertising campaigns and photoshoots revolving around the fear and the death of a beautiful woman.
So why is it that this collection surprised some critics (well, the very few critics left…) in such a positive way? It goes well with the passion for everything visually strong and gruesome that we seem to have collectively developed (by the way, Stephen King's IT directed by Andrés Muschietti opens today), but it is also a representation of the American dream morphing into an American nightmare filled with anxiety and fear also thanks to the depressing adventures of a president unfit to govern the country.
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