Alexander Wang (Q2591)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Alexander Wang is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Alexander Wang |
Alexander Wang is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2005
founder
On his brand Instagram account, Alexander Wang is offering Wangovers to tourists and locals he meets in the South Street Seaport neighborhood where he’s headquartered. It’s compulsively watchable content, not least of all because the people who agree to his proposals aren’t typical Wang customers. He’s made over a Bronx granny and a Westchester mom and a Connecticut construction worker with hair, makeup, and a new wardrobe—the works—and when he’s done with them you can just about believe that any one of them is making it past the bouncer and into the club.Wang’s press materials outline his new resort collection’s fundamentals as holiday dressing, subverted suiting, and velour tracksuits, but in palette, silhouette, and styling these clothes are all in fact club ready. Or maybe make that avatar ready? The designer said he and his team were inspired by “hyper-extended AI realities” to create what he described as a “computer generated look.” The concept comes across most clearly in the bandage dresses with honeycombs of peekaboo cutouts that seem to defy gravity, but it also applies to the exaggerated shape of a goat hair hoodie and the boots that look like extensions of the legs.
20 November 2024
On his brand Instagram account, Alexander Wang is offering Wangovers to tourists and locals he meets in the South Street Seaport neighborhood where he’s headquartered. It’s compulsively watchable content, not least of all because the people who agree to his proposals aren’t typical Wang customers. He’s made over a Bronx granny and a Westchester mom and a Connecticut construction worker with hair, makeup, and a new wardrobe—the works—and when he’s done with them you can just about believe that any one of them is making it past the bouncer and into the club.Wang’s press materials outline his new resort collection’s fundamentals as holiday dressing, subverted suiting, and velour tracksuits, but in palette, silhouette, and styling these clothes are all in fact club ready. Or maybe make that avatar ready? The designer said he and his team were inspired by “hyper-extended AI realities” to create what he described as a “computer generated look.” The concept comes across most clearly in the bandage dresses with honeycombs of peekaboo cutouts that seem to defy gravity, but it also applies to the exaggerated shape of a goat hair hoodie and the boots that look like extensions of the legs.
20 November 2024
Alexander Wang has opened a new store at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. At an appointment at his showroom in the South Street Seaport (also new), he reported that the store reached its monthly goal on the first day of business. Maybe that’s because the pre-fall collection on the racks is so well suited to Vegas’s oasis-in-the-desert milieu—not because it’s skin baring and sexy—all Wang collections are these days—but because of its mood.“She’s kind of a postapocalyptic showgirl,” Wang said. “I was inspired by this idea of Mad Max going through downtown Vegas. We were thinking of motorcycles and other vehicles covered in exhaust.” The denim and leather look sun bleached and desert weathered—Wang called it “pre-aged”—while the padded shoulders on zip-front jackets evoke the late Tina Turner, star ofMad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and the primal decadence of her Aunty Entity chain mail. Hotfix-crystal camisoles and cocktail dresses add a bit of Vegas-strip glitz, and for a showgirl’s off-hours, there are track pants and athletic shorts with a liquid sheen.The fall collection pictured here also revs at idle with its emphasis on motocross leathers, heavy-duty black jeans, faux-fur jackets, and hip-high cuissards. His recently introduced Ricco bag, with its “trap” (trapezoidal) stud detailing, has multiplied, with many new iterations in different materials and shapes, including one that looks a lot like a football, a callback to his sporty spring 2010 collection.Wang knows Vegas from childhood trips. “I always used to go there with my family for Chinese New Year. It was a big Chinese New Year destination.” So what did he make ofFuriosa? “Oh, I’m always a fan of the original.” If and when George Miller does make anotherMad Maxmovie, he could give the designer a ring.
29 August 2024
The backside of a black car was sticking out of a window on the Grand Street side of Alexander Wang’s Soho store last night. A crash scene? That’s what CCTV video posted to his Instagram Stories earlier in the day suggested.Talk about a loaded metaphor! His brand is about to turn 20, but provocation has long been part of its DNA and Wang, that car crash footage made clear, isn’t pulling back now. Inside, the boutique was transformed into a sort of deconstructed den of iniquity, with piles of money (faux), a pair of tanning beds (real), and a fireplace (electric) with a sportscar mantle. The first model out, wearing a full-zip bodysuit and sheer tights, crushed a cocktail glass in her hand before making her way around the space, signaling the zero-fucks-given vibe of the night. Also mood-setting: Kim Catrall, brash Samantha toSex and the City’s Carrie, was in the audience and basketball’s erstwhile bad boy Dennis Rodman walked the runway.The collection was top-of-the-line Wang: downtown, sexy and skin-baring, and with what seemed like a heavier than usual emphasis on leather. The leather came embellished with studs and cut into a roomy bomber, stamped with a croc pattern and draped into an asymmetrical dress, or used for the thigh-scraping wader boots with straps up the back that accompanied many of the looks. Denim, another mainstay, was downplayed, but a pair of washed and faded low-slung jeans and an oversized shirt looked good, less night out at the club, more street-ready in the old-school Alexander Wang way.Rodman modeled a roomy leather track suit and Slick Woods, who sported a similar red dye job but not the Ricco studs that the basket baller had glued to his head (the Ricco bag being Wang’s big relaunch this year), was wearing a velour version of the same silhouette. Athleisure or loungewear—whatever we’re calling it these days—is another brand fundamental chez Wang post-pandemic, and a bustier and narrow floor-length skirt made novel use of sweatshirt material. On the dressier side, stretch jersey was spliced and shaped into flared-hem leggings or tube skirts, and a wiggle dress, all with a latticework of peekaboo cut-outs. Origami’d blazers made cool accompaniments to the leggings and skirts.As the show emptied out onto Grand Street, a crowd of people were overheard talking about an after-party. Any one of Wang’s looks could’ve walked straight off the runway and into the bash and looked right.
6 June 2024
Alexander Wang wasn’t on the New York Fashion Week calendar, but that doesn’t mean that the designer or his brand have gone dark. The company recently relocated from Chinatown to a large, bright space at the South Street Seaport. Wang and his team now occupy two floors of the building where Carla Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como outpost used to be. The showroom has views of the Brooklyn Bridge, and in signature Wang fashion, there are black calla lilies, Byredo Loveless candles, and speakers built into the walls that pump out a rotation of curated playlists at different sound levels depending on the space.Of this see-now, buy-now spring 2024 collection he said, it’s “really this idea of the concrete jungle.” Thinking about new erogenous zones, he added vertical slits to the front of loose-fitting pants—which is a developing trend also seen at Phoebe Philo and Daniel Lee’s Burberry, where functional zippers allowed for adaptability. At Wang, the thigh and shin slits are bought as sold, sexy for the youth market they’re aimed at. Exposed underwear is a look he was early to: Scan back to the spring 2018 show he put on on a dead-end street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with cotton briefs peeking out of waistbands and bra tops hybridized with button-downs. Here he showed leather bra tops trimmed in crochet and a bomber-bra-top mash-up complete with pockets over the breasts—underwear that, for all intents and purposes, is now outerwear. On a similar mixed-use wavelength, he developed water-safe denim swimwear—the briefest of bikinis, cropped jean jacket, jeggings-style shorts, etc.—that can be worn directly from the beach to the club.Does Wang think about rejoining the New York schedule, where he was once one of its bright stars? He has a—gasp—20th anniversary on the horizon that might be a moment to come back. He doesn’t want to commit, but he did say he’s planning an activation timed to the release of his pre-fall collection. As designers up and down the fashion food chain reconsider the value and importance of fashion shows, a client-first approach might just be the right way to go for Wang. All you have to do is walk around downtown on a summer weekend to know that there are customers for his brand of young, body-positive fashion—lots of them.
20 February 2024
Alexander Wang has entered his heritage brand era. The Rocco bag, first launched in 2009, is the comeback star of his latest collection. “When people started asking me for the Rocco again, I said, ‘are we really there yet? Are we back here?’” Wang recalled at a showroom visit. “I felt like it was just literally yesterday when I thought, ‘there’s too much Rocco,’ we need to purge.”As it turns out, Wang’s Rocco revival is coming right on schedule. Fashion conscious young people move fast and having embraced the Y2K trend, they’re now turning their attention to the 2010s, as the very online among us have noticed. “They weren’t around for the first round,” Wang continued. “They’re digging deeper into the depths of the internet. I couldn’t believe it, but I was getting texts from people asking me to make it again.” Where the original gave slouchy “model off-duty” vibes, the new one’s aerodynamism is born from the high frequency printing techniques used to make it.The early 2010s were Wang’s golden years, if that term can be used for a designer not yet 40. He had opened his first store in New York and had not yet been appointed as creative director at Balenciaga, and he was defining his design language—the deconstructed tailoring, the underwear as outerwear, and the leather and denim that gave his brand more street cred than any of his New York contemporaries.Those who witnessed Wang’s rise might shudder at the idea that his pre-Instagram collections qualify as vintage these days, but the designer himself is cheerily forward looking. He’s fresh off a listening tour in China where he’s opened about 15 stores in the last year. It was his first time in the country since the pandemic, and the feedback he kept hearing from customers was the need for versatility.That translated into Dickies-style chinos designed with hidden stretch waistbands so they can be worn high or low; and styling devices like boxer short tops that can be pulled on like a belt, to create the exposed underwear look without the bulk. For a bit of fun he designed a photo print of coins that appeared on an oversized shirt. Buttons on jean jackets and denim shirts also looked like honest-to-goodness nickels and dimes, though Wang clarified that they’re not actual U.S. currency.Wang’s store expansion is continuing apace in North America. Toronto and Miami are scheduled to open before the end of the year, and Las Vegas and Vancouver are scheduled for early 2024.
24 October 2023
Alexander Wang has entered his heritage brand era. The Rocco bag, first launched in 2009, is the comeback star of his latest collection. “When people started asking me for the Rocco again, I said, ‘are we really there yet? Are we back here?’” Wang recalled at a showroom visit. “I felt like it was just literally yesterday when I thought, ‘there’s too much Rocco,’ we need to purge.”As it turns out, Wang’s Rocco revival is coming right on schedule. Fashion conscious young people move fast and having embraced the Y2K trend, they’re now turning their attention to the 2010s, as the very online among us have noticed. “They weren’t around for the first round,” Wang continued. “They’re digging deeper into the depths of the internet. I couldn’t believe it, but I was getting texts from people asking me to make it again.” Where the original gave slouchy “model off-duty” vibes, the new one’s aerodynamism is born from the high frequency printing techniques used to make it.The early 2010s were Wang’s golden years, if that term can be used for a designer not yet 40. He had opened his first store in New York and had not yet been appointed as creative director at Balenciaga, and he was defining his design language—the deconstructed tailoring, the underwear as outerwear, and the leather and denim that gave his brand more street cred than any of his New York contemporaries.Those who witnessed Wang’s rise might shudder at the idea that his pre-Instagram collections qualify as vintage these days, but the designer himself is cheerily forward looking. He’s fresh off a listening tour in China where he’s opened about 15 stores in the last year. It was his first time in the country since the pandemic, and the feedback he kept hearing from customers was the need for versatility.That translated into Dickies-style chinos designed with hidden stretch waistbands so they can be worn high or low; and styling devices like boxer short tops that can be pulled on like a belt, to create the exposed underwear look without the bulk. For a bit of fun he designed a photo print of coins that appeared on an oversized shirt. Buttons on jean jackets and denim shirts also looked like honest-to-goodness nickels and dimes, though Wang clarified that they’re not actual U.S. currency.Wang’s store expansion is continuing apace in North America. Toronto and Miami are scheduled to open before the end of the year, and Las Vegas and Vancouver are scheduled for early 2024.
24 October 2023
Walk around the New York City streets as the weather warms up and one thing becomes abundantly clear: the quiet luxury trend that we’ve been hearing so much about (including from this website) is mostly, if not completely, a virtual phenomenon. Maybe it’s because the Uber-rich don’t use the streets for walking—they have chauffeured Mercedes Maybachs for that, according to Succession, at least—but the vibe of summer 2023 is shaping up to be quite loud.Alexander Wang is on that wavelength. His pre-fall lineup landing in stores now follows the same sexy from-the-boudoir-to-the-club lines as the “Cupid’s Door” show he put on back in February on the eve of New York Fashion Week. Anyone who saw that collection will recognize these pieces. Lace-edged slip dresses, cotton poplin boxer briefs worn as shorts, and thong underwear arching over hipbones above slouched-on jeans appear in both places. Making its debut here is an extensive new range of accessories that he’s calling Dome. Is it just us or does the matte metal hardware look like it was modeled after a self pleasure sex toy?When the occasion calls for a more covered-up look, Wang has useful tweaked shirting with built-in smocking or wrapped details, as well as streamlined, slightly boxy tailoring on offer. He also gets that athleisure isn’t so much a trend for the young people he’s targeting as it is a way of life, hence the souped-up workout wear. His point of differentiation in this category is that he’s taken cues not from yoga and Pilates gear, which is another omnipresent sight on the NYC streets (a bit tired of all that), but the more oversized proportions of boxing and basketball.
7 July 2023
Walk around the New York City streets as the weather warms up and one thing becomes abundantly clear: the quiet luxury trend that we’ve been hearing so much about (including from this website) is mostly, if not completely, a virtual phenomenon. Maybe it’s because the Uber-rich don’t use the streets for walking—they have chauffeured Mercedes Maybachs for that, according to Succession, at least—but the vibe of summer 2023 is shaping up to be quite loud.Alexander Wang is on that wavelength. His pre-fall lineup landing in stores now follows the same sexy from-the-boudoir-to-the-club lines as the “Cupid’s Door” show he put on back in February on the eve of New York Fashion Week. Anyone who saw that collection will recognize these pieces. Lace-edged slip dresses, cotton poplin boxer briefs worn as shorts, and thong underwear arching over hipbones above slouched-on jeans appear in both places. Making its debut here is an extensive new range of accessories that he’s calling Dome. Is it just us or does the matte metal hardware look like it was modeled after a self pleasure sex toy?When the occasion calls for a more covered-up look, Wang has useful tweaked shirting with built-in smocking or wrapped details, as well as streamlined, slightly boxy tailoring on offer. He also gets that athleisure isn’t so much a trend for the young people he’s targeting as it is a way of life, hence the souped-up workout wear. His point of differentiation in this category is that he’s taken cues not from yoga and Pilates gear, which is another omnipresent sight on the NYC streets (a bit tired of all that), but the more oversized proportions of boxing and basketball.
12 June 2023
It’s been a minute since Alexander Wang has been on the runway in New York City. In between that May 2019 show and now, Wang faced allegations of sexual misconduct that threw the future of his business into question. He made a public apology and his accusers announced they were “moving forward,” and he put on a show in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in April of 2022, but a New York City comeback has a different level of import.A promo spot on his Instagram Reels starring Anna Delvey, the socialite fraudster under house arrest in an East Village apartment, seemed to suggest he wasn’t proceeding from a chastened place. Cheeky is more like it. That fits with the collection’s theme. He gave it a name, “Cupid’s Door,” and dressed the location in boudoir-ish style, with dusty pink velvet curtains and a mesmeric zebra-stripe carpet; lighting gels that cast a red glow over the whole place.Wang rose to fame in New York 15 years ago on the sexy sellability of what used to be called the model-off-duty look: all slouchy blazers, shredded tanks and tees, and skinny cigarette jeans. He’s no longer the new guy on the block—in fact, he’ll turn 40 later this year—but he still has a handle on what the kids want. Sexy is enjoying a comeback of its own in the wake of the pandemic. Though the spiked platform shoes looked like a relic from another time, the oversized blazers, (Julia Fox’s studded with crystals); lace-edged camisoles; and low-slung python print pants were on the money, he even had boxer briefs peeking over the tops of waistbands.The show was divided into three acts. The opening women’s section also featured a lot of denim and faux fur in a variety of textures and silhouettes, some on the formal side for Wang, who’s always been called a downtown designer. Backstage he mentioned Wong Kar Wai films like 2046 and In the Mood for Love, which might have prompted the dressy vibes.Next came a men’s grouping that was the coolest part of the collection, with casual, athleisure-y items like sweatpants and sweatshirts in soft, high pile fabrics, alongside cropped vests and more animal print pants. Look closely and these pieces were as sparkly as the women’s looks. “I wanted to bring a kind of different sensuality to the masculine items and archetypes, as well,” Wang said.The ending was a series of silk fringe dresses suspended from heart shapes built on a foundation of sheer net that revealed as much as they concealed.
For some reason, they conjured a memory of a long distant show, in the peak Alexander Wang year of 2011, whose hero pieces were made from spliced bias cut silk with fringes that spiraled around the hips and legs. Recapturing that heat won’t be easy, but when he came bounding out from backstage and made his trademark running bow you knew he was going to give it his best shot.
8 February 2023
First things first: We’d be remiss to not acknowledge that the last time we heard from designer Alexander Wang, it was during the fallout from accusations of sexual misconduct. After denying the allegations, the designer later released a public apology and then met with his accusers in private; their lawyer, Lisa Bloom, subsequently released a statement that the accusers acknowledged Wang’s apology and were moving forward.So last night he staged something of a “comeback”—and a savvily orchestrated one at that. For a designer known for his cheeky spirit, Wang played it safe: He was unavailable for interviews and he staged an open-to-the-public show far from his New York stomping ground, in Los Angeles’s Chinatown district. The whole event was titled “Fortune City” and, as such, leaned into the designer’s Chinese heritage—a theme, it should be noted, he had been exploring since before the pandemic and the accusations against him.Before Tuesday’s show, he shut down a particularly iconic plaza in the neighborhood—neon lights, pagoda-style architecture, hanging red lanterns—and guests were invited to peruse the local vendors for souvenirs like jade buddhas and beckoning cat figurines, along with skewered meats and sweet treats. Proceeds from the sales of a limited-edition T-shirt plus an undisclosed amount were donated to Chinatown Corporation, an organization dedicated to preservation and restoration of the area.While the venue was a departure, the clothes themselves were in line with the aesthetic he’s built over his decades-long career. He opened with pieces that felt instantly recognizable as part of the Wang universe—swaggering, broad-shoulder leather coats, oversized men’s white button-ups with bras exposed, roomy jean shorts over pants, slouchy boots, and ruched, fleshy bodysuits. There were Miu Miu–style barely-there skirts and, toward the end, draped white dresses and a smattering of velour tracksuit sets. The designer tapped some of his famous model friends—after all, he built his career on selling the “off-duty model” look—sending Alessandra Ambrosio and Candice Swanepoel out in tattered and frilled lingerie styles. A highlight was a very pregnant Adriana Lima with her belly exposed (reminiscent of a Wang look that Rihanna recently sported).Despite the controversy, Wang still has the power to produce a look that is effortlessly cool, slightly unexpected, and seemingly attainable.
His brand has worked in the past because people can see themselves as part of the “Wang” crew—that they can achieve the off-handed downtown glamor he has so long trafficked in. The ideas behind the masculine-feminine designs—a revealing bra top under a leather vest, say, or jeans and a blousy men’s shirt worn with a pair of stilettos—have a certain timelessness to them, the grittier, American answer to France’s gamine style.Wang came out for his bow at the end—in jeans, a white shirt, and a leather vest—a little more subdued but still looking hopeful. The crowd cheered, and phones were held aloft, and for a moment, the past was forgotten. Will that hold? It’s hard to say. A ’90s dance anthem suddenly blared over the loudspeakers as the crowd dispersed, some wondering if there was an after-party (there was not). “This is the rhythm of the night,” the voice sang. “This is the rhythm of my life.”
20 April 2022
In November, Alexander Wang said he wasskipping out on fashion showsin 2020 in favor of a 15th anniversary blowout. The choice was unfortunately prophetic; with COVID-19 locking down much of America, Wang never had the chance to have a party, a shopping event, not even a trip on the party bus around Manhattan. But also prophetically, he asked Steven Klein to photograph his fall 2020 collection on a cast of his favorite models—Gigi Hadid to Binx Walton—in December. That lookbook is debuting today, reframing Wang’s collection as a see-now-buy-now experience.The clothes that make up the collection are oddly prescient too—or maybe not. Glamleisure is par for the course of any Wang garment, and many of the themes he started to work on in seasons past resurfaced here. T-shirts and sweatshirts are ruched into couch-worthy corsetry while denim is used both for tailoring and for slouchy shorts. On a phone call prior to the collection’s release, Wang stressed the immediacy of his offering, clothing that can instantly connect to his shopper and weave into her life seamlessly.That’s smart business, but what about smart design? It’s the closing looks of this collection that push Wang’s aesthetic further, a set of dramatically off-kilter minidresses in neoprene and velvet with high shoulders jutting up or out, frantically popped collars, and dangerously asymmetric hems. They are the rare Wang Squad garm that prizes silhouette apart from sex appeal—an interesting new path for the designer to experiment with for his next 15 years in business.
4 September 2020
Calvin, Ralph, Donna. If you came up at a certain moment, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Donna Karan were the holy trinity, bigger than life icons who defined American fashion in the late 20th century. At 35, Alexander Wang is just barely old enough to have witnessed their glory days firsthand (only Lauren is still taking runway bows), but Wang wanted to pay them homage anyway. “What got me here... who were the pioneers who paved the way for me... American fashion and being born in America has influenced me so much. Not just the brands, but what they stood for: strong, unapologetic women.”The designer’s Rockefeller Center show—the first ever held at the venue, he proudly noted, and a spot extremely well-suited for the kind of public-facing event he’s tried to pull off in the past—was divided into sections. Donna Karan got the Wang treatment to start. Decades after she did them, her bold shoulders and no-fuss stretch jersey bodysuits still signal power—a testament to how groundbreaking her early collections were. Logo tees, denim in ’90s-ish light blue washes, and underwear as outerwear were the Calvin Klein codes Wang picked up on. Of the trinity, Wang’s chilled-out, sexy aesthetic is most closely aligned with Klein’s, only here a shy Pete Davidson ofSaturday Night Livefame stood in for Marky Mark, and did a rather irresistible job of it. Ralph Lauren-isms like flannel plaid, mile-long suede fringe, and wide-wale corduroy are rare sights on a Wang runway. That might be why the Lauren section proved the most compelling; change trumps continuity, and the cut of the corduroy blazers was good.The fourth part of the show was all white and heavily logo’d. It could’ve been mistaken for an ode to Tommy Hilfiger, a designer who would’ve liked to make the trinity a quaternity, but Wang said it was a tribute to suffragettes, who often wore the color. There’s no escaping the sense that the United States are in jeopardy in 2019, so it wasn’t hard to appreciate the sentiment of solidarity Wang seemed eager to convey with his multiracial casting and straightforward referencing of American fashion greats, even if this kind of overt lifting wouldn’t have flied in Calvin, Ralph, and Donna’s heyday.Wang brought his mom and dad out for a bow at the end of the show, and underneath them the LED runway was striped red and white like Old Glory. Fashion plays out on a much bigger stage than it did 35 years ago.
Wang understands that and he’s quite agile at its entertainment aspect. Yes, this was theater, but it was a feel-good moment nonetheless, fusing family and patriotism. We don’t get many of those these days.
31 May 2019
Alexander Wang kicked off a trio of name-in-lights shows happening in New York this week. When he went rogue in June, presenting his Spring 2019 collection three months ahead of the rest of the American industry, he was a definite outlier. There remains a question of whether it helps or hurts a designer to be removed from the heat of New York Fashion Week, but now Wang’s got Versace and Chanel for company. He made an event of it at the former Williamsburg Savings Bank in Brooklyn tonight, with a Champagne-and-caviar pre-party and a boldface guest in the form of Sophia Robot who posed for front row pics.The collection picked up where his June show left off. That one was an examination of his Chinese-American roots and his status as an immigrant. It mashed up chinoiserie with Axl Rose bandanas and punk safety pins. This one, Wang said, was a “celebration of the American hustle. We’re taking stereotypes of class and wealth and trying to remix them, giving status symbols a new sensibility.” The impulse, he explained, was equally related to his upbringing. He grew up a private school kid in San Francisco, a radically different experience than that of his older siblings. “There was always a question of where I fit in.”This played out on the runway as a fusion of uptown and downtown elements, some of which blended more successfully than others: sherbet-color tweed suiting accompanied by black leather apron skirts, camel coats topping boxer shorts, or T-shirts paired back to tuxes. Icons of the upper crust—tennis sweaters, rugby shirts, and polos—were tweaked with asymmetric cuts or unlikely materials like safety pins. Brass W buckles looked like a play on Hermes’s famous H. As for the leather and leopard-spot garment bags that many of the models wore slung over their shoulders, Wang said they were inspired by images of 1980s career types toggling between the office and the health club. They’re unlikely It bag contenders. But Wang does have a way with denim—see: the peeled-over waistband jeans, which looked coolly relatable with boxy blazers and bankers’ button-downs.So, where does Wang fit in? It’s been roughly a dozen years since he emerged, a downtown wunderkind with a flair for cool. Now, he’s in experimental mode, arguably out front in his efforts to align customers’ emerging habits with the industry’s old systems. But writing your middle chapter isn’t always easy.
Was he trying to tell us something with a series of ’80s-ish shirts that spelled outpain? Who knows. The pleasures of this collection were those jeans and blazers, and the sleek, deconstructed tuxes and tees.
1 December 2018
For the men too young to embrace “dad style,” might we suggest Alexander Wang’s Fall 2018 collection? Wang has taken the CEO trope that populated his Fall 2018 womenswear collection and applied it to his menswear, only with a much younger spin. Here is a lineup of collegiate-bro, finance-major staples—the football jersey, the rugby polo, the flannel pajama pant–as-actual pant—remade with Wang’s own tongue-in-cheek eye for taste so bad it’s good. Images of classic cars splash across tees. Fraternity lettering, with its elongated Greco-Roman serifs, spells out “Alexander Wang.” A bright satin bomber jacket in rah-rah cobalt is layered over a drinking Buds topside white turtleneck with a nautical monogram.Styled all together on a male model with the scruffy facial hair and knowing smolder of a Sunday morning college regret, the uniform could look a little costumey, like a parody of the bad-boy, white-dude masculinity that much of American culture is trying to run away from. But it’s hard to deny that some of summer 2018’s A-list schlubs are dressing almost exactly like this, from Justin Bieber to BDE poster boy Pete Davidson. As such, there’s a sort of Trojan horse appeal to Wang’s latest for men. Will those not crushing sixers with the guys pick up on it?
27 June 2018
With his move to a June/December show schedule, Alexander Wang’s Pre-Fall collection got a bit lost in the mix. But the clothes are now in store, and the photos Wang had taken to promote them look good—black-and-white shots of Sade were the starting point—so here we are: reviewing a collection that is “two seasons ago.” Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 are already live on this website.Rewinding, Pre-Fall looks like a template of sorts for the “CEO” show he did for Fall. It’s heavy on black and white, which dominated the collection that came after, and Wang emphasized hardware here, like he did on the runway. If there’s a difference, it’s the focus on what once might’ve been considered off-hours gear: more LBDs, fewer tailored suits. Though, of course, those sort of hard-and-fast rules don’t really apply to today’s workplace, and Wang’s modus operandi is to hybridize just about everything anyway. Some women will wear the black robe with micro grommets studding the lace hem as a coat, others will prefer to loll around in it in the bedroom. Sexy seems to be the prevailing message. Aside from that generously cut robe coat, the silhouettes are tight and short. Describing the collection himself, Wang offered a caveat: “Sexy but powerful. She’s an alpha woman, making her own money and her own decisions.”The #MeToo moment, alongside the “broken” runway show system and a backward retail environment (one of the impetuses behind Wang’s move to the June/December cycle), is fragmenting the fashion world. There’s more modest fashion in the marketplace than ever, it seems, but minis are also on the rise. For the women who fall into the latter camp, Wang is going to be their man.
19 June 2018
Alexander Wang stopped to give his family hugs on his way backstage after one of his typically energetic bows. It was the first time his father had ever seen his show in person. “What a perfect one for him to attend,” the designer said, “because the inspiration started with my mom and dad taking a trip together.” Though his parents are long separated, Wang reunited them recently in Santa Barbara, and he heard their story about immigrating to America. “How could I have never asked them about it before?” he remembered, tearing up a bit.Immigration is a subject much in the news, thanks to President Trump’s nativist stance. Wang tends not to make political statements on his runway. Typically, he comes by his topicality via pop culture (with regards to that, he had Pusha T—he of the Drake beef—in his front row). In any case, this collection felt more personal than political, though that in itself was novel.Note cards on every seat read: “Today marks a new beginning, a new identity, and a new day for my brand.” He’s shifted his shows to a June-December time frame to be more efficient with deliveries, and he’s dropped seasonal names (this was called Collection 1). But more than that, you got the sense that some soul searching has happened. In the wake of a fairly disastrous “guerrilla” show in Brooklyn last September and a somewhat misguided February show about CEO style, Wang embraced his family roots, a lacuna in his work. His family’sandhis own as a designer. Because, of course, there was a lot more in play here than qipaos and flannel pj’s withChinatownprinted down the leg. The collection was a proverbial melting pot of references: Axl Rose bandanas and easy separates in bandana prints, football jerseys and a sexy dress made from a deconstructed football jersey, motocross gear, biker shorts of the sort Bella Hadid has been knocking around in, tricked-out leather jackets, embellished surgical masks, pelmet minis with chunky logo belts, and a nice pair of deeply cuffed, so-faded-they’re-almost-white jeans. Plus, a new sneaker with Adidas. And Stars and Stripes face paint. It was hyper-styled yet still quite street. Blustery conditions aside—the presentation was held on-theme on a rooftop at the South Street Seaport—it was the most fun I’ve had at an Alexander Wang show in a while.
3 June 2018
Four Times Square, Condé Nast’s old headquarters, was the site of Alexander Wang’s Fall show. The 21st floor was hung with signage that read “AWG: Serving the Industry Since 2004,” and cubicle walls were arranged on either side of the runway. Wang got his start in fashion as an intern atTeen VogueandVogue. Firsthand accounts suggest he was as energetic then as his postshow sprints confirm he is now. But this show wasn’t so much about returning to his roots as it was about asserting the seriousness of his intentions. His “guerrilla” show on a dead-end block in Bushwick last September was roundly dismissed as a mistake; there’s nothing spontaneous about waiting behind police barricades for an hour for a party bus full of models to arrive. Chastened, Wang was so eager to start tonight’s show on time, guests received emailed requests to be prompt.Earlier this week, the designer posted a selfie of himself wearing sunglasses with the letters CEO on the temple. “When you’re not the CEO but still wanna dress like one,” read the caption. (Wang was briefly CEO of his company before Lisa Gersh, formerly of Goop, assumed the role last fall.) The sunglasses were a sneak peek of what we saw on the runway this evening. “CEO 2018” was emblazoned in silver across the chest of a button-down and picked out in rhinestones on the upper thigh of sheer black hose, a flip of the script from two years ago when Wang’s tights were stitched with the wordgirls. There was also an even less subtle Platinum Card motif. After the show, Wang talked up his mom, his sister-in-law, Gersh, and female senior staff. “I’m blessed and honored to work with such incredible, smart, powerful women,” he said. “It felt timely to do a collection that reflects a different part of my life, everyone knows the partying me, but I actually go to work more than I party.”Well, let’s just say you can remove the boy from the party, but you can’t remove the party from the boy. The notion that these clothes—save for a few of the most conservative jackets—could pass in a corporate setting is laughable. (Fashion’s power women have lately been mourning the departure of Phoebe Philo from Céline, whose grown-up tailoring is as day and night from the Wang aesthetic as can be.
) The body-con silhouettes, souped-up athleisure, spiky heels, andMatrixshades owed less to the old-media powerhouses who lined the front row than the new one in their midst: the 21-year-old model and social media sensation Bella Hadid, whose every outfit is chronicled by websites like this one, but whose own reach dwarfs that of the traditional press. With 16.8 million followers, that girl is platinum many times over. Whether us olds like it or not, in 2018 there may be no smarter business move than making a collection in her image.
10 February 2018
Alexander Wang’s brand stands for debaucherous coolness. It’s a mostly black proposition of slouchy street-to-party attire. As such, one can’t help but wonder: How much longer can Alexander Wang continue this schtick? To uninitiated Wang Gangers out there, it would seem that there is a finite limit to the number of subversive, sexy perversions you can spin into fashion.At his menswear line, Wang continues to prove critics wrong by digging deeper and deeper into his obsessions. Never one to cover up what’s on his mind, Wang is plumbing the depths of sportswear-as-ready-to-wear for Spring. Just don’t call it athleisure. Instead, the designer is using technical fabrics and sport jersey silhouettes to turn actual sport clothing into daywear for dudes. The best examples are branded with the Alexander Wang Global logo, like a rash guard–style top with rainbow-color graphics or loose wool gym shorts.There’s also a bit of tabloid fodder in the form of a collaboration with Page Six, featuring prints of real and fictional headlines. According to collection notes, the print is meant to reference the ’80s media boom in New York, those halcyon days when you might run into Liz Smith at The Odeon and end up quoted in theNew York Postthe next morning. In an era when gossip and fictionalized news has taken on new meaning—ahem, Mr. President—Wang’s Page Six fandom reads a little sour. Or maybe it’s smart. Consider this: His brand got a considerable boost from a blurry bit of aDaily Mailvideo showing Jennifer Lawrence dancing on a stripper pole in May 2017. Her response to the video? “I’m not going to apologize, I had ablastthat night. P.S., that’s not a bra—it’s an Alexander Wang top—and I’m not gonna lie, I think my dancing’s pretty good.” No press is bad press. And with that, let’s just wait and see where Wang’s Page Six pieces end up.
15 January 2018
Kendall Jenner has Marni Senofonte, Bella Hadid has Elizabeth Sulcer. Rolling with a personal stylist is practically a prerequisite for membership in the #wanggang. The attraction of Alexander Wang’s latest Resort collection, which the designer presented to buyers and press back in June, but is just now coming online, is that much of it will make the rest of us look like we have stylists on speed dial, too. Take the denim-cut-off-slash-leather-legging hybrids worn with a little tweed jacket in Look One. If that outfit doesn’t say #modeloffduty, what does? Consider, for starters, the bustier and white T-shirt combination or the tailored black blazer with the black denim jacket built in. Wang’s clothes are badges of cool, and they also make the business of being cool a little easier, and that’s clever.Beyond the hybrids, which Wang emphasized on the runway at his Spring ’18 show too, his other talking point here was the collection’s DIY spirit. At a showroom appointment, he said he added knots to the straps of a little black dress and pulled an asymmetric black top off one shoulder to make it look like his customer had altered things herself. The results are still polished, but not precious, which is key to Wang’s downtown appeal. The exception was his high eveningwear, which is still a relatively new category for Wang. One strapless gown was restrained to the point of asceticism in that it was as disciplined as a molded black leather bustier can be.
27 November 2017
The invitation read #WANGFEST and the concept was as follows: Put the models on a party bus and send it out into New York’s busy Saturday night with a convoy of Ram trucks—their flatbeds lined with tungsten lights. The first stop was Lafayette and Center Streets in Manhattan, the second was at Astor Place; both were open to the public, though announced. The press and retailers were invited to a dead end in Bushwick, Brooklyn—as it happens, directly across the street from the venue Eckhaus Latta presented in earlier this afternoon. Anybody who went to that show got a sneak peek of #WANGFEST’s after-party jumpy castle.Last Fall, Wang sold his Adidas merch off the back of a truck, Canal Street–style, in different parts of the city. Tonight’s events were designed to capture the guerrilla nature of those mobile pop-ups. It’s an aspect that Wang clearly likes. Otherwise, why not have the lights all set up and ready to go? Maybe the shows came off better in Manhattan. After all, you don’t just see 32 supermodels—Kendall, Bella, and Kaia included—pour out of a bus every night. But penned up in Brooklyn, after waiting in the cold for an hour past the advertised start time, the third show lacked a sense of spontaneity. We knew what we were getting, we’d already seen the show on Instagram.Collection-wise, though, this was a strong outing for Wang—not necessarily breaking new ground, but much more energetic than his show last season at the RKO Hamilton Theater. The most directional idea was the way he layered cutoffs over leather leggings. You could picture his clients experimenting with that look in real life. He had fun with denim, too, showing a skinny style with one leg covered in silver studs or shredded baggies with an easy drawstring waist. There isn’t a designer around without a deconstructed, off-the-shoulder button-down these days; Wang’s versions come spliced with silk camis or mashed-up with a sports bra, and he extended those metaphors to his tailoring. There were a lot of extra sleeves and jackets that were cut in half and worn as skirts. Wang’s Adidas collab is ongoing; everybody’s going to want to get their hands on the zip-front jacket with the extra sleeves cinching the waist.
10 September 2017
In 1983, Stephen King published what would go on to become one of his more iconic works, the automobile horror storyChristine. What does this have to do with Alexander Wang Fall 2017? Wang was born in 1983, and he riffs on the nostalgic thrill of King’s killer car in his new men’s collection. Sleek ’80s automobiles appear as graphics, lightning bolts rip down sweatshirts and tees, and Wang’s logo has been reimagined in a metallic auto font. The automotive motif continues in other, more playful ways, like the babes-on-motorcycle embroideries that appear on shirts, the tone-on-tone checkerboard suiting fabric that’s been made into a jersey top and sport shorts, and the motocross trousers that work on guys and girls alike. Of course, this being Alexander Wang, the collection ventures to go there with a 1-800 number graphic advertising the grim reaper on the back of a jacket.It’s not all spooky stuff. As the first time Wang has combined his main line men’s collection and T by Alexander Wang men’s into a single range, this season is more practical than usual. In between the more capital-F fashion pieces are easy separates that real dudes will appreciate: faded black jeans, dressed-up-enough sweatpants, shearling-lined jackets, and mashed-up plaids. The question now is will Wang Gang guys embrace the trend the designer’s girls have loved all summer long: fanny packs slung across the body? Keep your eyes peeled.
19 July 2017
Much wringing of hands has been done about releasingpre-collection imagesat fashion brands across New York and in Europe and beyond. Post the pictures when the collection is shown to stores months in advance of its arrival? Or when the clothes actually ship? Which experience is better for clients?The real question may be this: What does it matter when the brands in question are doing so much of their real interacting with customers via social media stars and their respective feeds? TakeAlexander Wang, who very nearly broke Instagram, if not the Internet in general, when he dressed hisMet Galadate, Bella “the body” Hadid,in a black lace catsuit. That skintight, shimmery feat of engineering isn’t actually part of Wang’s Pre-Fall 2017 lineup (which is posting onVogueamid dozens ofResort 2018 collections, cue the hand-wringing), but it is very much of a sexy piece with its 23 mostly black looks. In fact, one of the body-con LBDs pictured here features a glittery mesh bodice and sleeves that looks nearly identical to Hadid’s—from the red carpet to reality.This collection hews to second-skin, studded lines that are familiar to Wang watchers fromhis Fall runway show. Which is why the pair of silk charmeuse evening dresses that close the lookbook are so compelling. Sure, they’re accented with that heavy-duty silver metal chain, but their languid, vaguely ’30s-ish silhouettes defy expectations of him, not just ours, but those of the Bella-stans, too.
8 June 2017
The RKO Hamilton Theater is a fabulous wreck up on the corner of Broadway and 146th Street, way, way out of range of most Fashion Week goings-on. It was packed to the peeling rafters for Alexander Wang’s show tonight anyway, even without the promise of an after-party. The crowd stood around and inside an elevated square runway; a security guard periodically walked the perimeter asking folks to take their Peronis off the stage (the beer company was a sponsor), and a DJ spun rap heavy on the f-bombs. Early on, a couple of guys danced. We could’ve been at a concert the way the lights dimmed before the first girl stormed out.Wang played up the no after-party thing; the phrase was stamped across the T-shirt he wore to take his running bow, and it crawled up the sheer stockings some of the models wore. This must’ve been meant ironically because his collection, which was almost exclusively black, was very much in the key of party girl. He opened with tailoring, splicing traditional suiting fabrics with sweatshirting to take the starch out. But from there he moved swiftly on to catsuits, leather pants, shorts, stretch denim with bold silver button-flys, and chain mail tees. If Google did us right, Night of Treason is a little-known punk band. Westernwear is a developing Fall trend, turning up first at Calvin Klein yesterday, and here at Wang in the form of fringed shirts and jackets. He also used ball studding and rhinestones as accents.This was not particularly fresh material for Wang; some of the pieces seemed familiar from an almost all-black Fall show of two years ago, and after the sunny beach colors and upbeat spin of his Cali collection for Spring, it felt a little like retreat. At least we got a peek inside the majestically crumbling Hamilton Theater.
12 February 2017
What does an Alexander Wang dude do during the summer? This year, Wang’s guy is the surfing type, haunting Venice Beach in clothes designed for days and nights around the bonfire. Some of the pieces will be familiar to fans from the brand’s surf-core Spring 2017 womenswear show, namely the tie-dyed sweatshirts scattered with patches of buxom ’80s babes, but there are plenty more variations on the elevated Spicoli theme for his Spring menswear. Here, board shorts came embroidered with bikini-clad ladies, while black jackets were stitched withGirls. Reversed koi fish prints echoed the chill vibes of a Pacific coast dweller, whereas proper pullover anoraks and mixed-plaid shirts felt more suited to the North Atlantic bad-boy type. The staples of an Alexander Wang collection—beanies, stripes, leopard prints—persisted in ways new and old.Wang is a master of isolating and riffing on subcultures. Over the years he’s astutely elevated the mall goth, the moto girl, the under-the-bleachers troublemaker, and so many more American tropes. His newest reworkings, while savvy and commercially viable, didn’t necessarily get the heart racing. They’re familiar. What did create excitement was a series of rugby shirts made of heavy sport-technical knits. They were preppy, athletic, subversive, all-American. At this moment I don’t know a single man who owns something like this or would even think to want it, but I bet in a month’s time they’ll have taken over New York City’s Grand Street. That’s genius.
31 January 2017
Alexander Wang is one of a dozen or so designers who have opted to post images of their pre-collections in real time. In Wang’s case, we mean that literally; these clothes and accessories are available now on his e-commerce site. If some of the pieces look familiar, that’s because they walked his Spring catwalk; he’s collapsing the amount of time customers have to wait between “the show” and “the shopping,” and that goes for everyday items like his shredded white jeans and faded blue denim overcoat, as well as for special occasion numbers like a strapless black sequined dress with a holographic underlayer.The rest is new, though similar in sensibility to his recent runway turn, and likewise keyed to sell-ability. The plaid of low-slung board shorts has been cut into a double-breasted pantsuit, while Spring’s neon bra tops and tap pants have morphed into a black silk slip dress and black pajama set with a pole dancer jacquard. Pole dancers reappeared on new hats made in collaboration with Kangol as well as on stockings. The boudoir-ish vibe extended even to knits. A ballet pink sweater and sweaterdress came with built-in exposed bra straps. But if Resort seems particularly sexy in spirit, he didn’t ignore the comfort factor; see the leopard spot V-neck cardigan and matching leggings.
14 December 2016
The headline from theAlexander Wangshow tonight (other than the last-minute arrival ofMadonna—the girl has always known how to make an entrance) was the unveiling of the designer’scollaboration with Adidas Originals. The #WangSquad took their finale lap in black tees, sweatshirts, hoodies, basketball shorts, and tearaway pants bearing the iconic white stripes and inverted versions of the brand’s famous logo. Wang said the project was a year in the making: “I looked at what’s theirs, what they own, and I flipped it, literally and aesthetically.”He approached his new Spring collection in similar ways: by deconstructing wardrobe basics like the button-down, merging male and female signifiers including pinstriped tailoring and black lace, suggesting seriously unlikely pairings such as Hanne Gaby Odiele’s sheared white mink bathrobe coat, bra top, and board shorts, and otherwise subverting the natural grown-up order of things. The kids are going to love it!Wang was after a similar effect last season, but the way he went about it then was less subtle. It doesn’t get much more clichéd than pole dancer prints. Backstage he called this show, “50 Shades of GreymeetsLords of Dogtown.” Sex is still essential to the message, but he went about delivering it in a way that felt truer to brand Wang, tapping into his California roots. It didn’t all boil down to a bathing suit, but it came close. There were bikini tops made from button-down fabric and silk evening numbers modeled after bikinis. Rash guards morphed into clingy knit dresses and boudoir-ish slips were cut in neon tracksuit material. This wasn’t radical stuff, but it was cool. And it gibes with what a seatmate described as social media’s tendency to turn all of us, but maybe young women most of all, into exhibitionists. Wang has always been in step with the zeitgeist. In fact, it was so cool that anybody over, oh, say, 35 (with the exception, of course, of dear old Madge), might’ve left feeling alienated. For people like us? There’s the Adidas collab.
11 September 2016
The kids are all right—particularly byAlexander Wang, who for his latest guys’ offering tapped into the same stripe of youth culture that inspired his Fall womenswear. Here he once more spoke the gospel of a street- and skate-spiked mix that so suited his muses like Katie Moore, and to compelling result. The womenswear Fall 2016’s graphic runway motifs (Girls and Strict, to name a couple) reemerged here on hoodies and twill pants, alongside semi-illicit lines likebest high you can buyandNot for drugsacross a breast pocket. Add to that a goodly dose of more classic Americana—buffalo checks and brushed wool, handled à la Alex, naturally—and you had a lineup that struck a nice balance between the novel and the more timeless (the styling also incorporated the diffusion range T by Alexander Wang), the tension of hard and soft, of grunge and polish.To wit: a classic, oversize camo topper with lining in a candy pink curly lamb, or a coach’s jacket in swiss-dotted, glossy pony hair. Sure, a wide-wale corduroy shirt embroidered with tiny, writhing pole dancers might not withstand a Kondo-esque wardrobe purge a couple of years down the line, once its newness has worn off, but a buttery leather parka is one to be broken in, sure to stand the test of time.
11 August 2016
Nothing’s sacred, and that’s just the wayAlexander Wanglikes it. The designer booked Saint Bartholomew’s Church for his show tonight, then proceeded to send out an unholy mix of clothes and accessories that ladies to the left and right of me variously deemed Chanel slut and Supreme–meets–Magic City (a reference to Atlanta’s notorious hip-hop strip club). The collection, as the show notes explained (Wang wasn’t feeling particularly chatty this season), “deliberately opposes standard definitions of beauty and taste.”Those paying close attention will recall thatWang’s final show for Balenciaga, with its delicate all-white looks, was held in a Paris church, but four months on he has clearly gotten the angelic out of his system. Here, Wang mixed tony tweed with metal-pierced leather; the skirt suits and coatdresses were the most surprising elements of the collection, and the best. He turned the preppiest of preppy codes, embroidered corduroys, on its head, replacing whales with pole dancers—funnier than the intarsia sweaters featuring an enlarged version of the same motif. Wang also glamorized prison garb, sending out one model in a metallic jacket with “county” spelled out in bold block letters on the back; nota bene: It was lined with shearling. Marijuana leaves materialized as intarsias on mohair minis and coats, as lace insets on boudoir-ish dresses, as a print on miniature bucket bags.As for the declarative captions—“girls,” “strict,” “tender”—splayed across chests and wrapping around thighs where old-fashioned garters would be, they were as much Barbara Kruger as they were Supreme. Sloganeering is rampant across all categories of fashion at the moment. Who knows, maybe the election year has something to do with it? One step more sophisticated than straight-up logos, they serve the same essential purpose of brand identifying in our Instagram-obsessed world. They’re too easy, and Wang leaned on them a little too heavily.Ultimately, if nothing’s sacred, nothing’s shocking either. Wang’s collection failed to scandalize, but his buyers will be happy—they’re going to sell the hell out of it.
13 February 2016
Alexander Wang’s 10th anniversary show in September really resonated, with clothes that looked like better versions of items we’re all familiar with from the streets of New York City. His terrific Pre-Fall collection picks up where that one left off. “There’s no big concept,” he said, paraphrasing something he said backstage last season. “This is how I see people dress around me.”While it was styled to the hilt, with striped stockings, studded platform sandals, metal badge pins, and the odd pair of grommeted leather gauntlets, the layered, mix-and-match look of the collection had an authenticity that made many of the other ones we’ve seen this week look precious. As usual, outerwear was a strong point, from the cheetah-print kangaroo-hair Crombie that opened the mini-presentation to the oversize cheetah-embroidered bomber that closed it. He did some hybridizing of other pieces, splicing a parka and a flight jacket together and adding a removable blouson back to a roomy trench. The satin souvenir jacket popular on the runways lately got a California-palm-tree’d tweak.Wang has a handle on turning basics into special, desirable pieces. Take an argyle sweater with a cellophane window that exposed a slice of bra strap. (The merits of another argyle sweater with intarsias of pole dancers was more debatable, though it’s sure to be a hit.) He said he enjoyed working on the collection's evening pieces, explaining that his stint across the pond atBalenciagataught him a lot about the category. What was great about a narrow black column gown with grommet detailing along the neckline was how it retained that un-precious attitude he does so well.
9 December 2015
Alexander Wanghas always loved a bash, and for his 10th anniversary collection tonight he threw himself a big one. Up front, a merch table sold his DoSomething.org tees and sweats, which benefit the organization’s youth and social change efforts. It was straight out of a rock show, a feeling that was accentuated inside the venue by the crush of celebrities who sat in the front row.Kanye West,Nicki Minaj,Lady Gaga, Josh Ostrovsky (a.k.a. “The Fat Jew”),The Weeknd,Bella Hadid, Mary J. Blige . . . the list goes on. Post-show, a curtain at the back of the runway opened to reveal a phalanx of pole dancers, who entertained the throngs until it was time for the party’s big numbers.Tinashe, Lil Wayne, and Ludacris all performed. But the night’s main act was the video that played after the models took their finale spin. An extended highlights reel, it was a long, loud, chronological look back at Wang’s first decade, from his early bows, short-haired and baby-faced at 21, all the way throughlast November’s H&M collaband hisFall ’15 advertising campaign.It’s a critical moment for Wang. In July, he andBalenciagaopted not to renew their contract beyond its first three-year term. Such a short tenure at such a prestigious house could tarnish a designer’s reputation, but Wang has emerged essentially unscathed and, as he seemed to be saying with tonight’s hoopla, bigger than ever.When the split was announced, Wang suggested that he wanted to turn his focus to his eponymous brand. That meant expectations were elevated for this new collection. If some of the surrounding festivities (ahem, those pole dancers) were somewhat off-message, he nailed the collection, which was free of pretense. “No concept,” he said backstage, summing up the straight-off-the-streets ethos of the clothes. “We’re always asking ourselves what’s modern. Well, what’s modern is what’s right in front of us.” That’s an idea that’s gained traction in the industry over the last couple of years, but it was Wang’s own approach at the beginning. It worked for him then, and, save for a couple of costumey fringed leather pieces, it worked for him tonight with his deconstructed denim, army surplus separates, pajama silks, slip dresses, and one shrunken satin bomber jacket. Wang intuitively gets what the downtown cool girl wants to wear. There’s no disputing the New Yorkiness of his clothes, but no anniversary collection is complete without a throwback moment.
Anybody still wondering what the AW510 insignia that turned up on an oversize hoodie and some of the men’s pieces stands for? Wang, remember, hails from Northern California: 510 is the born-in-the-Bay-Area area code of his cellphone.
13 September 2015
Whether you rate this Wang depends on why Wang's your thang. If you relish him for the breath-of-fresh-air, democratically charged, conceptually playful, sport-spiked rawness that he has injected into New York for a fair while now, then look away. Because this was a collection packed full of beautiful clothes whose premise was, well, pretty one-dimensionally literal: luxed-up workwear and sportswear. For the many who love Wang for just that, though, this outing was peerlessly straightforward.M51 jackets in olive and black were cast in a moleskin-touched finish of Italianate luxuriousness. There was a suede-esque boilersuit, an oversized carpenter's coat, a Carhartt reboot overall, and a pit lane jacket all in fabrications as studiedly lush as their leather-patch tags were blank. Adorable but anonymous superlight nylon bombers came in an oversized diamond quilt. An aviator bomber featured a headphone loop. Barcode basketball vests, QR-code Jacquard sweats, and tearaway shorts rounded things out. If the clothes weren't too conceptually engaging, they would certainly be very rewarding to wear.
25 June 2015
Alexander Wang started off back in the mid-aughts taking inspiration from the street, and he's still at his best when he's working that beat. You could have walked straight out of his showroom onto Broadway three floors down in almost anything he presented today, feeling better than when you walked in. In short, his clothes made you want to shop. And we're not just talking about the T-shirts stamped with QR codes that will open up his e-commerce site when you scan them on your phone.He had a dark khaki trench. He had a little black dress. He had a sweater and skirt set. Essentials all, but they weren't quite basic. The dark khaki trench came with a double buckle and knotted closure, a loose riff on a tool belt. The strapless LBD was layered over a boxy black tee that simultaneously dressed it down and gave it a cool edge. And as for the sweater and skirt, the former was ribbed with a narrow band of peekaboo slits above the chest and the skirt had an extra apron-like appendage (another tool shop reference) that added a little, but not too much, drama to its proportions. Tracksuits are certainly happening out there, but the oversize version here felt somewhat out of place. Wang is growing his denim business, launched last year, and the cropped and flared jeans he paired with a sleeveless, belted top and stacked-heel sandals with wide straps of black leather and chunky buckles were spot-on.
4 June 2015
Fashion history is scattered with collections devoted to the shade of black. Marc Jacobs' Louis Vuitton swan song comes to mind; so does a vintage Comme des Garçons show circa Fall 1992. There are many others. Tonight it was Alexander Wang's turn. Explaining his motivation at his studio yesterday, Wang said, "Our customer wants black, so why not do an all-black collection?"To hear a designer mention his customers, like Wang did, is rarer than it probably should be. It was certainly refreshing. But there's at least one good reason not to do all-black clothes. Black can look flat on the runway, and even flatter in runway pictures. Wang knew he'd have to juice it to make it work. Which must have been what got him thinking about the many subcultures for whom black is a way of life. Goths, Japanese Lolitas, heavy-metal hair bands. He gave Marilyn Manson and Kiss specific shout-outs, and you could see them both in the models' slicked, spiky 'dos and in their Frankenstein boots. Attitude for days.Generally speaking, the clothes were less extreme than the styling, though not without an edge. Wang gave the pieces energy by loading them up with hardware. Ball-chain trim decorated the velvet revers of a tuxedo jacket and a silk jacquard robe, and lined the curving seams of willowy sleeveless dresses with cutouts at the shoulders. Three columns of silver snaps marched across boxy jackets, and there was the occasional wallet chain attached to the waistband of cropped trousers. Quilted vests were modeled after bulletproof ones, but they'd shed any menacing undertones. Kendall Jenner's fitted top and long, fluid skirt trimmed with chain fringe at the hem counted as the most romantic evening look of Wang's career.Partly because there was so much black, fisherman sweaters with the same ball-chain detail and flocked blue jeans really stood out. Ditto a hunter jacket in a grungy red and black plaid. The stars of the show were the MA-1 jacket and fur-trimmed parka made from a silvery 90 percent metal nylon. They'll connect with shoppers in a way the sheer chain mail dresses worn underneath—as fabulously kinky as they were—never could. All in all, and aside from those Frankenstein boots, this looked like the most retail-friendly collection Wang has done in a while. The customer reallyisalways right.For Tim Blanks' take on Alexander Wang, watch this video.
14 February 2015
"Today's look? Getting active." Thus read the window display in Decathlon, a mass-market French sporting-goods retailer not 50 meters from Alexander Wang's Paris showroom. Behind it was a pair of €10 marled, tech-touched, pseudo-bouclé-ish sweatpants. Which illustrates the only downside of carving out new ground: Once you've defined that new territory, others tend to flood in behind you. Wang has been at the vanguard of sportswear's elevation into a bona fide, wear-anywhere apparel category over the last few years. His work is, of course, at a level incomparably higher than the vast majority of the apers. But to prevent them from cramping his style, he must develop his oeuvre.Fall was Wang-meets-SoCal: winter surf, but Wang-urban, so without the surfboard. As a fashion motif it worked well, had broad customer appeal, and delivered with luxury-touched élan. Lambskin backpacks, bucket hats, and bombers were lasered, somehow, to make them look like terry cotton. This seemed like manipulating prime rib to make it taste like cheap burger, but the results looked great, as did the shearling fleeces. Technical water-resistant nylon M65 jackets had a same-color camouflage relief and Velcro panels. Not all of it was overtly surf-sprayed; an action-backed green melton jacket and the geometric knits could live anywhere. But the tropically tinged fern-relief tailoring that ran through this collection sang winningly of a fashion-kissed Stussy-ness.
22 January 2015
News broke yesterday that Alexander Wang is launching a denim line. As we've come to expect from Wang, the jeans combine cool factor (on-trend cuts lifted from vintage men's styles) with a serious dose of technological experimentation. "I wanted to do denim for a long time, but it's a hard [category] to revolutionize," he said. "Most black denim starts fading after three washes, but ours lasts eight before fading." The jeans go on sale online and in his own stores next week, and it won't take long for them to infiltrate the closets of cool types.His new Pre-Fall collection is similarly customer-focused. Back in June at his Resort presentation, Wang was keen to set an agenda; boxy, utilitarian shapes that called to mind firemen's gear predominated. Here, his touch was much more nuanced. Wang was looking at menswear, loungewear, and uniforms, but he didn't hit you over the head with the details. You almost missed the black flight suit lacing down the side seams of an army green silk slipdress, and a leather wrap coat clearly inspired by a bathrobe remained polished and elegant. Another clue that Wang has shrugged off conceptual clothes—at least for the moment—came in the form of a capsule collection of eveningwear, made after multiple requests from his retailers. There was nothing revolutionary about the minimal black and white gowns hanging on a rack, but they looked unarguably chic.
3 December 2014
Sneakers on the runway! You've heard that line before. (Trainers have had a good year so far—see Dior's and Chanel's Fall Couture collections, for starters.) But in the case of today's terrific Alexander Wang show, it means something new. Wang, a sneakerhead if ever there was one, used the sporty shoes as a leitmotif, reinterpreting iconic styles as clothes. Nike's familiar Flyknits were reimagined as clingy body-con dresses in electric colors, while the signature white and green of Adidas' Stan Smiths became—what else?—tennis dresses.It could've gone in a gimmicky direction. We suppose a foam-injected leather dress that looked like running shoe tread came close, but otherwise these were sexy clothes that women are going to want and wear. We're thinking, in particular, of a series of colorful, flippy little minidresses made from tiny pleats and worn over second-skin black turtlenecks—like techno Madame Grès or 21st-century Fortuny. He mentioned both figures at a preview. Wang has always been a designer who prefers to look forward rather than back. Maybe his time at Balenciaga is turning him on to fashion history?Either way, this was good stuff. Especially in contrast to last season's show, where he seemed to make a point of getting the models to look as unsexy as possible. This collection reconnects him to his early days, circa roughly '07 to '09, when girls first started falling in love with his streetwise downtown cool. Today the new Wang was the old Wang, only with a lot more artisanal details. We're calling it early: The high-waisted slim-line pants he showed with fitted tees and racy plissé camis will be one of the defining silhouettes of Spring '15.
6 September 2014
Alexander Wang was unable to join his men's collection in Paris, giving its transportation metaphors a certain irony. But even without him there to explain the emphasis on webbing or the D-rings as simultaneously decorative and functional, you could sense Wang's urban emphasis and fabric-innovation focus. For a Spring offering, there was a big thrust on outerwear: one coat in mesh bonded to nylon, a car coat in unlined suede, two more (long and short) that riffed on a classic nubuck-rimmed backpack, a waterproof resin-coated cotton coat, and a dressy, satin-finish option. His main point of differentiation is the material development; glazed raffia that approximated tweed and a foam-injected fabric mimicking tire treads would be fun to wear, in part because they are potential conversation starters. Slim utility pants, lengthened shorts, digital tie-dye-print knitwear, hybrid sweater-shirts, backpacks, and zip-front boots lined in orange like classic bomber jackets established a Wang travel wardrobe of sorts. And if you can believe, this is the first time he has designed a baseball cap available for purchase. If something—beyond Wang himself—felt missing, it might be that his guy looks almost too flawlessly styled to hit the road for fun. Throwing caution to the wind looks good on everyone.
25 June 2014
Tie-dye from Alexander Wang? No, fashion's resident "downtown" designer hasn't gone bohemian on us, although we all know he loves himself some Coachella—it's where he made his H&M collab news public back in April. At his Resort presentation here in NYC this morning, Wang said he was preoccupied with the idea of care instructions and things being ruined by washing, hence the Laundromat location of his lookbook pictures. His isn't conventional tie-dye, of course. Instead it comes on fine leather T-shirts with raw edges or on opaque PVC slickers. And it's often bisected with graphic stripes of contrasting color, the better to give it a gritty, city edge.Following on from his Fall collection, which likewise put an emphasis on streetwise practicality, there were resin-backed patchwork utility jackets and cargo pants here; dungaree overalls with exposed ribbing trim; and knee-high, lace-up desert boots. If the boyish patchwork canvas pieces erred a bit stiff and oversize, the tie-dye looks struck the right note. They'll be collected by his fans alongside clever items like a terry-cloth sweater imprinted with the word "WET" and a sweatshirt emblazoned with his logo morphed into a bar code, as if the letters bled in, yes, the washing machine.
2 June 2014
"He dragged us all out to Brooklyn on a wintry Saturday night—it had damn well better be good," was the thought on our minds as we waited half an hour past go time for the outer-borough-averse to find their seats. The setting was Duggal Greenhouse, a new event space in the Navy Yard, the Web site of which advertises the latest in "solar energy, organic air purification, and eco-friendly building practices." Aside from the fact that it was—Shock! Horror!—in Brooklyn, it was an apt setting for a conceptual collection about pounding the New York pavement. "Extreme conditions and survival," were the designer's talking points at a preview. There were references to hunting, mountain climbing, and other outdoor sports, but the clothes, as is typical for Alexander Wang, who joked that he goes to the gym "at least once a month," were resolutely urban.Making it in the big city requires two things: a great coat and walking boots. Wang had both. Outerwear was the show's strongest category, and there were a lot of persuasive options, from suede down puffers to shearlings to silk Windbreakers with jacquards of mountain scenes at the hem. A strong sartorial element—shades of Wall Street, the heartbeat of the city—wove through the collection as well, via suiting pullovers, leather shirt-collar dickeys, and silk cravats. As for the snap pockets that decorated the front of efficiently cut checked shifts, they were designed to house Moleskine notebooks, smartphones, lighters, and lipsticks—not bait and tackle.The lights went down and a dozen more models walked out, taking their places around the edge of the runway. As the circle started and stopped, the heat-activated leather clothes on the models stationed in front of the set's metal vents changed colors—from black to blue or yellow or purple—then slowly faded as they rotated away.That clever, high-tech finale sealed the deal: The show was just about worth the price of admission. That is, until we were confronted with the extreme urban conditions of an epic town-car traffic snarl on the way out of the Navy Yard. Escape from Brooklyn! We would've been better off hoofing it, like one of Wang's over-the-knee-boot-wearing survivalists.
8 February 2014
Alexander Wang is rarely in a suit and rarely in a pattern. And he is one designer who designs, if not for himself, at least what he himself would wear. From the very beginnings of his menswear collection, the emphasis has fallen on the sort of pieces he personally favors: sportswear with a strong dose of street. Several seasons in, it still is.But for Fall, Wang aimed to bring some of the more traditional elements of the menswear wardrobe into his world. He brought in men's suiting patterns, like herringbone and glen plaid, but remixed them, so to speak, into a gray and black mélange that resembles static fuzz. Tailoring is still barely a presence, though a baseball shirt introduced last season has morphed into a leather baseball shirt jacket that, worn open, may be what a blazer comes to look like when it crosses the border into Wangland. Black remains the dominant color and leather the dominant material, as in bonded-wool car coats and glazed jeans that come with ultra-long legs designed to be scrunched.Fall found Wang's style concentrated if not dramatically expanded. This, the implicit message ran, is Alexander Wang. That message was made explicit by the addition of the first men's logo pieces, in the mold of those he introduced for womenswear for Spring: T-shirts and sweatshirts that bore his name in laser-cut neoprene.
15 January 2014
Forget logomania. Pre-Fall ’14 found Alexander Wang in a more circumspect mood, as he traded in thebrandemoniumof last season for a relatively somber meditation on the way things are put together and the way things fall apart. Deterioration was the more visible of the two themes, what with items like Wang's wool jacket with an eroded-looking collar, a camel cashmere sweater that peeled away in the back, and his very cool acid-print shirts, which seemed to have been bitten through by some particularly angry and tenacious moths. "Coming together," meanwhile, got its most interesting riff in shirts that wrapped around the hip, apron-style, and sculpted tees and dresses in which the excess selvage had been sewn into a Mohawk-style fringe. The fringe was one Western element here; more were to be found in Wang's footwear, which hybridized cowboy boots and brogues. Gaucho pants, too, put another accent on the style of the frontier.Overall, however, this was a collection heavily indebted to menswear of the urbane, stockbroking kind, with an emphasis on button-downs, suiting materials, overcoats, and that classic white-collar palette of neutrals. Perhaps all the deterioration at play was Wang's way of suggesting that our global Masters of the Universe are coming apart at the seams. There was sporty outerwear that looked—purposefully—like garbage bags, too. Occupy fashion! Occupy fashion? That interpretation seems a stretch. But apropos of this collection, it's safe to say that Wang's stock will stay on the rise.
2 December 2013
Alexander Wang was a teenager the first time logo mania came around in the nineties. "That was the height of me in high school, reading and obsessing over [magazines] and being a fashion geek," he said before his show today. Branding would seem to be top of mind for the designer, who is not yet 30 and heading up not only his own company, but also Balenciaga. But, he explained, the real reason for the logos on his Spring clothes was the nostalgia he feels for a time when "fashion was really fun, when there was wit and humor, and it wasn't so serious."Now, Wang is on a first-name basis with fun, so when he thinks it's gone missing, fashion is in trouble. And he definitely scores points for his bravado in trying to resurrect it today. Translating the bold block letters of his logo into guipure lace, jacquards, and stamped leather was a cocky move, to be sure—one that could likely divide people. Genius or gimmick? We're going with the former. It's not hard to imagine the black leather trench laser-cut with a repeating ALEXANDER WANG pattern on the back turning into a thing. But it was the more subtle interpretations of the idea—like the menswear checks, big and small, that made you do double takes—that were the real winners here. The designers doing logos back in the day weren't half as clever. And with the VFiles of the world and other street-wear brands making bank by tweaking designer branding, it's delightfully meta to see Wang doing it for himself on the runway.Counterbalancing the in-your-face aspect of the logos and the Explicit Content tees (another nineties callback, thank you, Tipper Gore) was soft men's cotton shirting. But button-downs _un_buttoned up-to-there over boxers were no less cheeky. Also, if you thought the midriff was a once-and-done thing, think again. Now that he's got the Balenciaga thing going in Paris, this collection felt like a move on Wang's part to reconnect with the street. It's been an animating force for the designer since the beginning, and it didn't let him down this season.
6 September 2013
Summer leather, at one point in time as proverbially oxymoronic as "summer sweater," is fast moving into the realm of accepted reality. Designers are unwilling to abandon skin to Fall. Given his predilection for the stuff, it's no surprise Alexander Wang falls in with that number. His Spring collection was as leathery as any other. His solution was to perforate it, for grid-printed jerseys (baseball, basketball) and shirts, and to slice and dice it into stretch mesh for other tops. Breezy! And perfect to pair with two-tone oversize leather shorts.The whole collection leaned lighter, with poplin tunic tops replacing shirts, and curving seams to reduce bulk on jackets. A new shoulder bag, from the Explorer series, is essentially a backpack minus one strap. Slimming down for Spring all around. It is bathing suit season, and on that subject, over at T, Wang offered those, too.
25 June 2013
Alexander Wang has built a call-and-response system between his runway shows and his pre-collections. Fall was about big volumes and roundness. And so, as he said in his showroom this morning, Resort is "about deflating those proportions and flattening the structures." Pleating and darts were his two preoccupations. That sounds like dry, technical stuff, but the new lineup showed off his famous retail savvy. Low-slung, baggy leather pants, a leather cheerleader miniskirt with asymmetrical darts, and a leather dress with batwing sleeves, the results of a pattern cut on the circle, were all instant wardrobe refreshers. Vacuum-pressed pleating at the back of an elongated blazer and the nipped waist of a keyhole-front smock dress were subtler interpretations of the theme. In Wang's world, they qualify as basics.The big surprise here was the color pink. If it's ever appeared in an Alexander Wang collection, we don't remember it. There were a lot of pastels on the racks, too. "I wanted something sweet but almost saccharine, synthetic-feeling," he said, explaining that candy wrappers were a reference point for the collection's metallic Lurex knits. At this point, the sweatshirt isn't so much a closet refresher as it is a staple. Wang kept his fresh by weaving Lurex with cellophane. He called its spongy texture a mousse knit.
12 June 2013
Perhaps you heard, but since his last time on the runway, Alexander Wang was named the creative director at Balenciaga, succeeding Nicolas Ghesquière. How will the 29-year-old designer change Balenciaga? How will Balenciaga change him? There were enough questions swirling today to fill the grand spaces of the Cunard Building, the cinematic venue where Wang was showing for the first time. Looking for answers, it was tempting to find them in the opening notes of his soundtrack. It was "Eye of the Tiger," theme song fromRocky III, the one in which Rocky "rises up to the challenge of his rival."Before the show, the designer said he was looking at boxing, so that explains that. Fur mittens and ribbed knit caps tucked under matching snoods were obvious props. More generally, Wang was fixated on roundness and blurriness. "A reaction," he said, "to the graphic slickness and flat angularity" of his last collection. We've been talking a lot about texture this week, but Wang took the burgeoning trend to new levels. Caught by the fuzz, he brushed mohair to give it a hairy quality, embroidered leather appliqués on alpaca, and overstitched astrakhan with silk threads. His colors were grayed-out and foggy, save for a rust-colored ponyhair. Focusing first and foremost on outerwear, he cut his coats oversize and with dropped waists, sometimes adding a crisscross detail or a draped twist of extra fabric at the midsection. Hunkered down, his girls will be ready to do battle with the elements next winter, at the very least.There was plenty of the designer's moody showmanship on display, but will these looks fly off the runway and directly into cool girls' closets? (Wang's knack for making that happen is purportedly one of the reasons Balenciaga came calling.) A sweatshirt with a fur body and knit sleeves had that kind of potential, as did sweaters stitched with columns of faintly iridescent sequins that dipped precipitously in back. Simple duchesse satin T-shirts with little slices at the shoulders worn with tapered trousers in the same rich fabric keyed back to the airiness of his Spring collection. Who knows what we'll see in Paris two and a half weeks from now, but we're hopeful that it captures some of the easy verve of those evening pieces.
8 February 2013
It snowed in Paris during the menswear week. Not feet, not even very many inches, but enough to send the French into conniptions and lockdown mode. Flights were canceled, hands wrung. Yet one still had to run around the city to shows and appointments. It made every editor wish for an armored parka. And then one got to Alexander Wang.Wang's focus for Fall was outerwear: oversize, all-covering, all boasting enormous snap-detachable hoods roughly the circumference of space helmets. There were sinister-looking versions in glazed nylon and some in padded leather. Wang incorporated some sportswear details, like raglan sleeves and kangaroo pockets, that have defined his men's collections so far, but also worked in articulated shoulders for better fit, and some higher-end materials, like shearling and Loro Piana cashmere. The look was, as the look has been, dark, streamlined (basically hardware-free), and a little threatening. (The caps, with attached button-close face masks, didn't exactly help.) Being as driven by outerwear as this collection was—cropped pants were the bottom half of most of the looks—it felt, by necessity, a bit constrained. But there's no arguing that Wang at the moment has a lot on his plate. And the showroom—his own, mind you, in the tony first arrondissement—was positively thronged. Give the people what they want, and…
17 January 2013
Alexander Wang was showing off his new collection to editors on Monday mere hours after the official word came from Balenciaga that he'd been installed as the brand's new creative director. The designer declined to talk about his plans for the august French house or how he'll manage both labels, but if his demeanor was anxious, the clothes he was shooting for his pre-fall lookbook betrayed none of it.On the contrary, the suiting was some of the most confident of his still young career. Cleanly tailored in donegals and jacquards, the suits were almost sober, save for cool details like zipped-on doubled lapels in black leather. One flocked wool jacket came complete with a black leather panel down one side. "Is it a jacket or a vest?" Wang said. "I wanted that feeling of everything blurring together." Counterbalancing the tailoring were softly draped frocks that had the sporty ease of a sweatshirt, with rolled-up sleeves and artfully rumpled necklines. Here, he said, he was going for a shrugged-on feeling, but the little dresses won't be out of a place in an office setting. Should he wear his new responsibilities chez Balenciaga with the same kind of aplomb, he'll be well positioned for the future. The wooden staircase his team had built, in the only Williamsburg photo studio big enough to hold it, spelled out Wang's message for all of us: He's moving up.
5 December 2012
"We kindly request that you refrain from using flash photography," a voice announced over the loudspeaker before the start of Alexander Wang's show. "That includes cell phones." What a bit of wishful thinking that was. Mere seconds after the overheads dimmed toward the end of the show and the black lights switched on to reveal that the models' white clothes glowed an electric shade of yellow, Twitterers took to their iPhones to share their pictures. Wang is just about as It as you can get in New York fashion at the moment, and he delivered on his reputation, sending out a focused Spring collection that put his strong, singular vision on display."After last season's austerity," he explained, "I wanted to pull garments apart, experiment with volumes." Wang's is a precise kind of deconstruction. The clothes were all right angles—no asymmetries here—and the scalpel-sharp slices that separated the graphic panels of everything from a clinical white cotton shirtdress to a sand-dune-colored leather jacket were hand-tacked like sutures. As the show progressed, the splices became cutouts in wavy zebra stripes. The experiment reached its culmination in a series of sexy dresses that seemed to float on the body thanks to the invisible fish-line embroidery holding them together. The designer called the effectTron-like. Fun fact: The first fishing line they tried melted under the heat of the irons used to press the samples, so team Wang had to devise a new one of their own.Function often suffers when designers put so much emphasis on form, but that wasn't an issue here. Wang smartly stuck close to traditional American sportswear design. Spongy leather T-shirt dresses were modeled after baseball uniforms. Liberty Ross, a catwalker whose star appears to be on the rise after her husband's cheating scandal with Kristen Stewart, modeled a simple windbreaker. The black-light moment will be what people talk about and remember, but even without it, this was a powerful performance.
7 September 2012
"We wanted to take a cleaner approach," Alexander Wang said of his latest men's collection. "To strip away the hardware, the cargo flaps, the pockets—all that we've played with before." Clean it may be, but it's also dark. Spring tends to send designers thinking light thoughts, but Wang's choice of a largely black, white, and red palette felt ominous. It also swallowed up, at least in photo form, some of the details that make the collection interesting. The twists here come at the stitch level. Jackets and tops have intersecting seaming and graphic paneling; those in contrasting colors had the look of flags. Make that Black Flag. It's a severe take on sportswear—emphasis on sport, with baseball jerseys in leather and boxing shorts—but the ready-for-anything mentality suits Wang. To his credit, he doesn't go halfway. His napa leather bombers are rubberized; even his dress shirts are waterproofed. "Taking more of a slick approach," is how he described it. Also more of a total approach: Debuting for the first time was a men's shoe, a chukka style that Wang says he wears all the time.
26 June 2012
Coming off what he described as a heavy Fall season, "where we lacquered and laminated everything," Alexander Wang was after something light and delicate for Resort. Ribbed knit sweaters were held together at the seams with lingerie straps, wrap dresses peeled open at the back, a puffer vest was constructed with a see-through nylon exposing the down underneath, and the lug soles on boots were an almost translucent white, "like they were dipped in Elmer's Glue."The designer 180 is one of our business' most reliable phenomena, but if Wang's latest changeup was inevitable, it thrilled nonetheless. He's got such a good handle on cool. At a crowded preview of the collection this morning, editors from at least three different publications found reasons to exclaim, be it a special sweater knit from softer-than-soft T-shirt fabric that had been sewn into tubes and stuffed with polyfill, the crocodile-stamped midriff-baring vests, or the return after two years of his best-selling wedge shoe, the Alla, now in a faux lizard and mock croc combo.Taking the item-y feeling of the season a step further, he also introduced a new collection of Objects. Tops here, without a doubt, was the matte black yoga mat and accompanying carrier.
13 June 2012
Alexander Wang's biggest news of late is a highly ambitious plan to open 14 stores in China over the course of the next year. It's likely no coincidence that what he showed today was his most luxurious-feeling collection to date.Wang continued the trompe l'oeil theme of his pre-fall collection, this time taking "a surrealistic approach to fabric manipulation," as he explained in a preview. "It's this idea of shrink-wrap, lamination, covering up, lacquering." Nearly every surface seemed to have a slick sheen or gloss. He lacquered the tweeds on coats, hooded jackets, and even chunky wool sweaters. Leathers were glossy and seamless, and suede pants and coats came with waxed panels. The clothes themselves were also covered up. Wang sent out mid-calf-length skirts (with those great, soon-to-be-ubiquitous knee-high boots), buttoned-up coats, and fishnet turtlenecks pulled up over models' faces. This was definitely Wang in a more grown-up, if not dystopian, mode. (Those turtlenecks recalled surgical flu masks.) His designs exuded a new precision, as well as a new, expensive polish. And we're not just talking about the all-gold hardware. Ninety percent of the fabrics here were custom developed, and it showed.Lately Wang has been shrinking from his so-called downtown reputation. But he also recognizes that his cool factor is part of his stock-in-trade. Witness his T campaign featuring freaky-cool, of-the-moment South African rap group Die Antwoord, who attended the show today. Wang, much like his fellow New York talent Marc Jacobs, is proving he can play to both sides. To wit, his new Pelican bags in vachetta leather. Their raised geometric motif may have been inspired by industrial metal crates, but they looked as structured and finessed as it gets.
10 February 2012
The street is never far from Alexander Wang's mind. It won't come as a surprise to discover that he street-cast his lookbook model, a skater from Philadelphia. (Nor should it be much of a surprise, given Wang's talent for coming out just ahead of the curve, that after the designer booked him, the modeling agency that had all but forgotten it represented him wanted to send him to Europe for go-sees for the menswear collections.) The point is, Wang's key words arestreetandsport. His burgeoning men's collection may be more refined than the T line out of which it grew, but it hews close to its original.That's not to say it's not evolving. For Fall, Wang introduced his first men's suit, in an unfussy, slightly boxy cut. "We thought it was important as we moved into ready-to-wear that our guy should have a suit," Wang said. "Even if that's not what we are building our collection about."Suit-and-tie types should look elsewhere—there isn't a piece of neckwear in sight—but it's all in keeping with the tough, military-tinged vibe the designer has been pursuing. He's tapped into the idiom of protective gear for quilted jackets and spongy knits and has a free hand with leather, shearling, and neoprene. Why all the armor? One of the collection's dominant motifs is a shattered patchwork, suggestive of violence not far at hand. Take from that what you will. The thing about the street is, sometimes it ends up Occupied.
10 January 2012
Trompe l'oeil was Alexander Wang's big talking point for pre-fall. Menswear fabrics and strict tailoring were the collection's dominant motifs, but in his hands, classic houndstooth patterns and glen plaids became burnout sweaters and intarsia knit dresses, while jackets layered in transparent mesh were slit at the collar and lapels, the better to weave your long hair through. The concept extended to accessories: Mesh booties were designed to look like old-fashioned seamed panty hose, and the season's new clutch was a sunglasses case blown up to exaggerated proportions.As wacky and whimsical as all that sounds, the results were seriously chic. Less "street" than his latest runway show, the vests, pencil skirts, and pants had the feeling of wear-to-work pieces for girls who have the good fortune to work in creative fields. (The leather harnesses on the jackets and coats, for the record, were 100 percent removable.) Just don't call what Wang does "downtown." Months away from opening a 5,000-square-foot store in Beijing, as he is, he shouldn't have to remind anyone that his is a global brand. One in which handbags play a significant role. Rocco fans will be pleased to hear that there's a smaller version with a lunchpail-style zipper that's been dubbed "the Rockie" in the new lineup.
5 January 2012
Athletic chic is one of the week's early trends, but for Alexander Wang it's basically encoded into his tough-girl, street-wear DNA. This time around, the designer felt a need for speed, taking inspiration from a full buffet of velocity—NASCAR, BMX, motocross; he even claimed to have mined a sneaker factory for fabrics.Wang may sell at a contemporary price, but the way he evolves an idea has distinct designer finesse. He cycled easily through the collection's groups—or "gangs," as he called them. It was a jam-packed journey beginning with great dark laser-cut mesh bombers that revealed a dot matrix of bright polos layered beneath. These were followed by nylon cargo couture florals (peplums and pockets!), sexy race-car instarsia knits, and little body-con lasered leather minidresses. There's a real cleverness to the way Wang develops something like a fascination with mesh from the real deal into the grommets on a coat and a trompe l'oeil print on the sleeve of a cropped floral hoodie. And those tribal-looking motifs on the sheer jerseys that closed the show? Stadium seating maps.More importantly, all Wang's ideas yielded a whole lot of great merch beyond the shoes (today a pointy, strappy nineties-ish pump) and bags. There was little you couldn't see hanging on a rack, walking down the street. And that's a good thing. Wang is opening his second flagship early next year in Beijing and plans to open seven more in Asia and Europe before year's end. The fast track chez Wang isn't just a motif.
9 September 2011
Alexander Wang is seemingly unstoppable, and he's set to add menswear to the list of his conquests. It's a category he broached initially with his more casual T line. After growing it, he inched into the designer market with a capsule offering for Fall. The accolades began arriving almost immediately. He'd scarcely started men's T whenGQnamed him their Best New Menswear Designer of the Year; his first designer pieces hadn't even hit stores when the CFDA nominated him for its emerging-designer Swarovski Award."For me, when it comes to menswear, it comes down to uniform," Wang said of his aesthetic. "I really wanted to visit the classics and things that guys know and understand. It wasn't about reinventing the wheel and testing them. Just taking things and applying these details to the point where the details aren't the first things you notice. You're attracted to it because it's something that you recognize, and you fall in love with it because the details lure you and surprise you."Sportswear pieces are the building blocks of the collection—the sportier the better. Track pants, running shorts, hoodies, sweatshirts, and varsity jackets are all key. Wang's own uniform, to be precise. The details range from minute to the maximal: mixed materials, and even shapes, sharing the space of a single garment. It lends them a bit of a Frankenstein charge. Wovens and knits bleed into one another; technical twill abuts glazed nylon finished off with a paper-thin leather Wang calls calf chiffon. Outerwear is the strongest category, with a combo bomber jacket the best of the bunch, but glazed cotton knits are strong as well, some intarsia-ed with subtle tonal patterning.If there's a but, it's that Wang's classics and menswear's classics aren't always one and the same. Suffice it to say, there are no suits here. In broad strokes alone, the collection resembles the T line from which it grew. And more so than for women's, Wang freely admits, the customer for men's T and men's ready-to-wear is the same. The ready-to-wear can boast refinements in fabrics and fabrications, but its own aesthetic is still emerging. Clarifying it relative to T will be the designer's challenge going forward. The guy he's creating it for, Wang says, isn't a fashion guy—it's the guy his girl likes. That guy is sure to appreciate the tech-y, sportif cool on offer as well as its casual ease. But is he ready to pay fashion-guy prices?
21 June 2011
Alexander Wang had big news at his Resort presentation this morning: He's set to open his second flagship store next year, this one in Beijing. We've seen other luxury brands dilute their message in order to best serve the global marketplace this season, but that isn't Wang's approach. On the contrary, the urban, utility-chic vision he showed off on his Fall runway remains laser-focused for Resort, only this time there are more sports elements.Fresh off his Accessories Designer of the Year win at last week's CFDA Fashion Awards, Wang is introducing his first-ever sneaker, the better to complement a collection informed by pictures of seventies-era marathoners. His starting point came across both literally (the color-blocked, contrast-trim running shorts come to mind) and more figuratively. Zip-front jackets were as slick as glass, pants had a tracksuit slouch, and a sexy L.B.D. was streamlined like a wetsuit.Yes, scuba references surfaced here, as they have at other labels this month. In fact, Wang did some of the most covetable swimsuits we've seen anywhere, in bold solids with racy cutouts that were echoed in his dresses. The bikini as layering piece is a look we've been seeing New York City girls sporting this summer, and Wang had his own take: showing a two-piece as underpinnings for a fab patchwork windbreaker vest and black trousers. His label is booming, but he's clearly paying attention to his ground zero, the street.
14 June 2011
No argument, Alexander Wang is one of New York's fashion stars. His latest laurels: aGQ/CFDA menswear award, and the opening of his first flagship just days away. And yet, for the past two seasons, his ready-to-wear collection has received a mixed response from editors who thrive on Wang's buzz and retailers who do gangbusters with his ever-expanding T line.But with today's show, Wang made a triumphant return to form that injected the sexy, tough, cool-girl attitude he's built his brand on with a heightened sense of luxury. The designer explained in a preview: "We're almost poking fun at decadence and luxury." Almost, and well, really just enough. All the lush, cocoon-y outerwear was clever, not clownish or immature in its hybridizations of bomber jacket-turned-poncho, boyfriend blazer-turned-fur coat, and a tuxedo jacket with puffer sleeves.You could simultaneously get the jokey comment on the current fur mania with his mink-wrapped sunglasses and boudoir bobbles on high-shine metallic loafers while still thinking it all looked pretty great. And it did. From all those coats to the smart split-up-the-side heavy-ribbed knits paired with glitter drainpipe jeans (perfect for the "Billie Jean" effect on the runway) and a rose-hued satin skirt of slashed ribbons, to his various riffs on the tuxedo for evening."We're looking at where can we push our language further," said Wang, noting that his aim was to create a point of difference from his lower-priced lines. You saw that here in pieces that magically morphed from chunky hand-knit to needle-punched angora to satin, a special effect you'd never see in T. That's the result of newly sourced factories in Italy, where Wang will also be producing his shoes. The designer is clearly on a roll, and with the hire late last year of the company's first president, Rodrigo Bazan, whose résumé includes Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs International, Wang's future is burning bright. And that's no joke.
11 February 2011
This wasAlexander Wang's largest pre-fall collection to date—the result of a shift in priorities. "We're bulking up pre-fall so that buyers come in [and see] a big part of what we have to offer as a brand, and then come in to Fall to focus on the [runway]," the designer said.This was undeniably a collection made to sell, stocked as it was from one end of a rack to another with solid Wang classics: biker jackets, pale washed denims, easy silk jersey dresses, slouchy knits, and lean tailored blazers. "It's our best-selling pieces with a lighter hand and a new femininity," Wang said. You saw an unaccustomed softness in a biker jacket in unlined caramel suede instead of black leather, and in the subtle flash of zipper edges on white shirting where once there might have been sharp studs. Even the new version of the Diego hobo, called the Robin, is considerably lightened up in the hardware department.A slim leather shirtdress and wool pencil skirt with a trumpet hem that reached below the knee also spoke to the grown-up direction with which Wang has been flirting for a few seasons. There was a restrained elegance to a simple jersey dancer's dress with a midi hem and pretty draped back. If Wang's commercial bent seems a bit un-fun for his dedicated twentysomething customer, she can comfort herself in that patch-pocketed denim vest with chunky ribbed knit sleeves, while looking forward to the more directional pieces that are sure to be in his runway show.
6 January 2011
"Did you notice anything?" asked Alexander Wang at a preview earlier this week. He paused a beat. "There's no black!" That's right, New York's prince of downtown darkness is turning toward the light. "I was looking for something optimistic," he said, "something pure."The show began with a series of all-white looks that felt—for anyone who recalled his witchy Wall Street Fall—as fresh as cannonballing into a pool in late August. He worked a construction motif into these deconstructed looks: Coverall straps crisscrossed on the backs of loose, smocklike dresses; there were stiff canvas carpenter's jackets and pants, and industrial materials like Tyvek and what looked like silver insulation. White paint was in the models' hair, and the slashes of rose gold here and there were meant to evoke duct tape.Spring, Wang explained, was also a reaction to the ubiquity of a look that he had a hand in popularizing: If everyone does a skinny jean and motorcycle jacket, it isn't new anymore, is it? His success with that genre has been enviable. The construction theme was, indeed, a crossover from the building boom he's experiencing in real life—an expanding studio, a new Tribeca apartment, and his first store, on Grand Street. So the trick here was to turn the fashion page while still letting his dedicated Wang-ettes preserve their street cred. Yes, they'll love a scribble print created by having his staff doodle on butcher paper. But while the finale of ivory, mint, and terra-cotta had a certain beauty, it's not clear whether his proposal of midi hems and dresses that read Belgian instead of Boom Boom will be the right solution.
10 September 2010
Alexander Wang is in expansion mode again. The 25-year-old with the three-year-old brand and a pair of CFDA award nominations is opening a New York boutique before the end of 2010, and growing his Resort collection to two deliveries in the process.At an informal presentation of the new lineup today, he said, "We've been feeling urban streetwear for a while. I wanted to take this in a direction that felt more unknown to us." "Plantations," "suburban," "organic," and "sheltered" were among his unexpected talking points, but don't be fooled; there was still plenty of Wang's signature edge. Mixed in among the nubby hand-knit half sweaters, asymmetrically pleated board shorts, and vacation-ready knit jacquard tube tops were patent-leather pea jackets and technical mesh cape/trench hybrids that wouldn't have been out of place on his Wall Street-inspired Fall runway.As usual, outerwear was strong here. A slouchy "bathrobe trench" in synthetic twill is Wang's favorite piece in the collection, and will probably be a key look for buyers, too. In a savvy move designed to appeal to retailers, the designer is launching an "essentials" collection of jackets, blouses, and pants. It wouldn't surprise us if the stores ask him to add one of his Resort looks—a calf-length black slipdress worn with a machine-crocheted turtleneck—to that list. It had an understated appeal that felt timely and timeless in equal measure: yet more evidence that this young New Yorker is going places.
31 May 2010
Earlier this week, an accessories editor at a major magazine told me she was forced to ask the staff's stylists to stop using Alexander Wang's lace-up sandal boot from Spring 2009 in their shoots. Consider that: a contemporary designer snagging a seasonal honor—Most Favored Editorial Shoe—usually taken by the likes of Balenciaga or Louis Vuitton.Defined purely by price point, his is a contemporary brand. But it's a label Wang politely chafes at, and over the past three seasons he's become sui generis: a designer with the creative chops to increasingly earn a place in high fashion's conversation, but whose clothes are accessible to more than just the one percent.Situated at this powerful vantage point, Wang chose Wall Street's Masters of the Universe as his starting point for Fall. He took the traditional banker's suit—a push into uncharted territory for this Master of the T-shirt—and deconstructed it in a dark and sexy vein. It was "about growing up, about progress," Wang said before the show. "It's a lot more sophisticated, more polished." Polished yes, but hardly proper. Wang knows his girl, and she's not following the office dress code.Cropped blazers, tailcoats, and vests exposed slivers of skin and were worn with thick ribbed thigh-high legwarmers, often yanked down over chunky heels. Matching backpack straps were crisscrossed in front to give a bondage vibe. Layering was part of the story, but Wang's goal was to do it in a more precise, less street-chic manner, slicing away extraneous elements. A key part of that was his new trouser, a sort of glorified belled legging that his leggy front-row fans will no doubt jump all over.Perhaps as a counterpoint to his gray flannel inspiration, Wang also made the case for velvet in all forms, including chenille. That seems a tough sell, even for him. Then again, there's a good likelihood that the growing number of worldwide Wang-ettes—some of whom surely caught the show live-streamed on SHOWstudio or on the massive American Eagle LED billboard in Times Square—will love every little bit.
12 February 2010
"My girl, she's got to go to work sometime," Alexander Wang joked. Presumably, the designer's cultish fans have been wearing what he calls his "casual sportswear" around the clock—to the club and to the office. But for pre-fall, he's zeroing in on trousers (in narrow, almost legginglike knits or cropped and full in menswear wools) and jackets that came long, lean, and lapel-less, as well as short and tiered. Wang's also feeling for layers, throwing shorts or a mini over those skinny pants and adding sexy, peplumed leather corsets on top of a shirtdress or under a suit. The collection's banded sweater and long, mid-calf-length skirt were definite departures from his edgy downtown vibe—yet decidedly winning. Wang should push this serious thing further. But, of course, it would be foolish to abandon his fan base entirely. For his party girl (and the stores who can't keep the frock in stock) he did another one of his draped goddess dresses, this time with a leather bra-cup bodice and sequins.
3 December 2009
Coming off his collaboration this year with the Gap, Alexander Wang has had all-American sportswear on the brain. His resort collection was filled with denim and khaki, and he ran with a sporty theme once again for Spring. This time, Wang's subject was that most popular red-white-and-blue pursuit: football. You felt the pregame excitement of those Friday-night lights as you walked into his show space at the massive Pier 94. He drew a crowd that few young designers can command: It girls galore, important European editors, and even photographers Terry Richardson, Inez van Lamsweerde, and Vinoodh Matadin."We want to create clothes that are timeless and classic," Wang said a few days before his show. "Our girl wants investment pieces." Those are mature words coming from downtown fashion's pied piper—but Wang's take on "timeless" means a classic gray sweatshirt fused with a corset, or cut short and boxy and worn over lace-up caramel leather shorts. The look here was varsity pinup, as if a bevy of cool but wayward high-school girls had raided the locker room armed with a pair of scissors. Ribbed athletic socks with sliced-out backs were tucked into tasseled wedgie loafers and rugged, zippered sandal boots. There was a wink-nudge cleverness to "tighty whitey" dresses and a bag that looks like a deflated football, though other bits of fun in this vein will be too costumey to appear very often outside of magazine shoots.The investment elements were, mostly, hooded and utilitarian outerwear pieced together from a variety of fabrics, including nylon and army canvas; a double-layer leather jacket worn by Angela Lindvall was another MVP. All in all, Wang's cheering section will be plenty pleased. But, remembering how fully realized his last collection was, you somehow kept expecting something more—particularly in this space, and for this crowd.
11 September 2009
Alexander Wang's latest Resort collection isn't completely devoid of black party dresses, but they certainly play a more minor role than they have in seasons past. The CFDA/VogueFashion Fund winner chalked up his newfound interest in all-American sportswear—think chinos, chambray, denim, and T-shirts—to his experience collaborating with the Gap. (That mini-collection hits the retail chain's stores on June 16, ladies.) Naturally, Wang put his own downtown-cool spin on his Resort classics, pairing an almost-preppy nautical stripe sweater with a wrap skirt in midnight blue sequins or tweaking a traditional fisherman's vest into a satin and mesh romper. As for those black dresses, the designer had quality if not quantity: The best of the bunch was a draped and wrapped number that exposes a lot of leg and nails the elusive dressed-up yet effortless vibe that Wang has so successfully made his signature.
3 June 2009
Following a few seasons at West Chelsea's Eyebeam Studio, Alexander Wang moved his show to Roseland Ballroom, a venue that's witnessed generations of cool kids, loud music, and smoky late nights. In other words: a hand-in-glove perfect fit for Wang's cool clothes, loud crowd, and smoking after-parties. Walking into the big ballroom—as packs of photographers flashed It chicks Jen Brill and Sophia Hesketh, and even some bona fide celebrities (Sarah Jessica Parker and Zoe Kravitz)—it felt like…2008.Well, 2009 has been a surprisingly good year so far for Wang, who is, of course, the CFDA/VogueFashion Fund's latest big winner (and who, intriguingly, had British retail tycoon Sir Philip Green in his audience today). "We're evolving," he said a couple days before the show, in his studio. "We're asking: What does growing up mean for our girl?" His answer included buzzwords liketailoringandluxury, but tailoring and luxury laced with a savage thread. We saw jackets with sleeves edged in cubed metal rivets, leathers fringed with foxtails, and a trench with beastly toscana sleeves and croc flaps. There was coordination to the hilt, with matching shoes, belts, and bags (he now has 40 styles of the latter, up from last season's five). Still, even with the matchy-matchy, the polish, and the new maturity, his models stomped down the runway with their accustomed—almost dangerous—sexiness.There were shades of Montana and Mugler in that wild power babe. But Wang's vision is a singular one, and it clearly speaks to twentysomethings. If you think the pomp of a runway show like this one seems out of place in an era when others are scaling back, Wang actually does have his feet planted on terra firma: His great clothes and accessories are priced to sell. And this year? No after-party.
13 February 2009
"It's time to bring sexy back," said Alexander Wang. But hasn't he been hard at work at that task for seasons now? "A louche kind of sexy," he amended. So out went the mesh, perforated leather, and other athletic references from Spring, and in came an elongated scarlet velvet tuxedo jacket, a coral washed crepe one-sleeve draped cocktail dress with hook-and-eye closures, a light blue denim bustier with black velvet bra cups, and a gold-stud print trench. Wang still loves that effortless, thrown-together look, but the Fashion Fund winner is growing up, and so are the silhouettes and the sensibility of his clothes.
11 December 2008
"They wanted color, they got color!" Alexander Wang declared a few days before his show. After a Fall collection done almost entirely in black, the new palette took shape during a trip to Miami, home not just of those amazing tropical Art Deco pastels but also of the so-bad-it's-good eighties Deco-redux tackiness ofMiami Vice.A determination to move forward is indispensable to a young designer at a crossroads, and Wang is gaining momentum with his new shoe collection and a diffusion line of T-shirts called T by Alexander Wang. The imaginary muse for his Spring show, he said, was a sexy, devil-may-care sort who would play basketball in a dress; hence the mesh insert patterned like beads of sweat on a draped jersey goddess number. But even with the infusion of brighter, more body-conscious looks, Wang's familiar grunge girl was still very present here—her toughness heightened by pierced and fringed black leather platform sandals.There was an athletic edge to the proceedings, and—with the exception of cropped muscle tees and Swarovski-laden sweatpants—it worked. Several of the sporty pieces (especially the silk cargo pants, a sleek anorak, and fringed sweatshirts) will be winners with the kind of go-getter who likes to cap off an all-night party with a pickup game at the West 4th Street courts.
5 September 2008
When he designed his Resort collection, Alexander Wang was thinking of "a girl who's living on a motorboat, hanging her clothes to dry on the deck." Sounds like she could be related to his perennial downtown muse, as embodied by co-conspirator Erin Wasson. And in fact, Wasson may be one of the select few able to pull off the hole-ridden thermal onesie, shown here with a fringe-collared blazer or a trapeze tee. Thankfully, Wang's insouciance also came in more polished form: Standouts included a graphite silk sweatshirt with a zipped back and a kimono-style jacket belted over a wide silk trouser.
3 June 2008
The after-party wouldn't start until five hours later, but Alexander Wang and his stylist/muse Erin Wasson looked more than ready to let loose. Maybe it was the booming music, or the crowd jam-packed into the cavernous Eyebeam Atelier in West Chelsea. Or maybe it was the clothes themselves. The industrial, late-night ambience fit hand in glove with Wang's sexy-tough girls in their ripped tights. Marching out onto the runway from the smoky, scaffolded darkness, they were primed to do battle with whatever got in their way.Wang diligently worked his juxtaposition of borrowed-from-the-boys and slinky femininity, producing a slew of great pieces on both sides of the divide. He balanced the proportions of baggy trousers, oversize blazers, and terrific chubby-nubby knits with lean tanks and vests, super-skinny pants, or no pants at all. And he delved for the first time into eveningwear—though more successfully with a louche satin tuxedo and a bugle-beaded vest over black jeans than with pleated chiffon dresses that looked out of place in these grungy environs. His ten-piece collection of slouchy washed-leather bags was a welcome development, however, and one that Wang's army of enthusiasts is guaranteed to adore.
1 February 2008
When model Iekeliene Stange arrived at her Alexander Wang fitting the week before the show, the enchantingly off-kilter beauty walked up to a look intended for her and proclaimed it "exactly what I want to wear." For Wang, that moment is the fashion equivalent of a slam dunk. Simply put: The 23-year-old designer loves to make cool, chic clothes that cool, chic girls love to wear.Wang said he had been thinking about the filmWorking Girland Giorgio Armani's eighties-era power dressing. "It's about a humble girl who came from nothing, making a living," he explained. But his real muse is his customer, particularly the insouciantly ultra-stylish being he calls the M.O.D. (Model Off-Duty). This time around that included the show's stylist, semiretired runway star Erin Wasson.The result could best be described as a refined vision of what might happen if a pack of catwalkers plundered the career floors at Bloomingdale's circa 1987 and wove the loot into their own wardrobes. Naturally, it would mean looks like an oversized gray blazer with sleeves jammed up to the elbows over a wife-beater and shredded cutoffs, or a lace-trimmed bustier paired up with the trousers that once partnered with that aforementioned jacket. Beyond those easy-to-fathom ensembles were polished dresses cut in menswear wools and shirting along with casual wardrobe essentials, like the elusive just-right, thin heather-gray T-shirt and terrific, slouchy light denim jeans. These soon-to-be-staples made up for a few looks that should only ever be worn by professional mannequins.
5 September 2007
For his second full ready-to-wear show, Alexander Wang focused on a combination of eighties hip-hop and seventies Parisian chic, channeling Run-D.M.C. and YSL simultaneously. As unlikely a mix as those influences are, Wang managed to pull off a modern and polished, not to mention commercially viable, collection.A dense crowd turned up at an abandoned Hell's Kitchen warehouse to applaud slim cropped-at-the-ankle leather pants with a hint of biker about them and a silk crepe T-shirt dress studded at the hem. The green matte-paillette shirtdress or the pleated gray silk strapless number would be fun for a party-girl night out, paired with a little fur jacket for Uptown or an olive anorak for Down. Wang, who first made his name with his line of cashmere knits, is off to a strong start.
2 February 2007
2005
0 references