Louise Goldin (Q3214)
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Louise Goldin is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Louise Goldin |
Louise Goldin is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Louise Goldin's collections have been gaining in focus since she relaunched her label a year ago. This season was her strongest yet: Goldin deployed her signature technical knits to tell a very coherent story, one inspired by, as she put it, "summers with [her] husband." In practice, that meant a mash-up of ideas inspired by festivals such as Coachella (Goldin's husband works in the music industry) and others taken from tennis. The latter influence was apparent in an array of crisp white looks that referenced tennis-kit vintage and modern, and graphic knits conjuring the web of tennis racket faces and green grid courts.All of this was cheerfully accessible, with the piped knits and cotton shirting making for particular standouts. But the most intriguing looks on the catwalk today may have been the musically inspired ones. Among these, Goldin brought a particularly keen sense of invention to a couple of abstractly patterned knit dresses based on pixelated photographs from Coachella. The knit itself was layered palimpsest-style, so that parts of the pattern below broke through the pattern on top, and the dresses themselves wrapped sinuously around the body in a seemingly unbroken stitch. That kind of innovation is a Goldin trademark, of course, but this season, working off intimate references, she at last seemed to be innovating in order to express something direct and heartfelt, rather than making the process the main point. Craft is good; love is better.
6 September 2013
Louise Goldin is a reticent designer. Almost all she would say about the thinking that went into her latest collection was that she was making the kind of clothes she'd want to wear. As goals go, that's fine, but it was clear from the looks on the runway that a ton of ideas went into them. There were ideas about dimensionality and layering, and ideas about asymmetry, and ideas about clothes working together in modular ways. There was also a fascinating conversation happening between Goldin's heavy horizontal ribs and knife-sharp circular pleats, which teased out the graphic possibilities of texture and shape. And that's an abbreviated list of the ideas in the mix here; the technical stuff on Goldin's knits could fill several collection reviews on its own.It's self-evident that Goldin has a forceful intellect; it's the message her clothes are sending that's a little garbled. This collection wasn't incoherent—there was an overarching fierceness to the attitude, and some kind of internal logic was at work. But it was a logic that simply refused to make itself known. In the face of that silence, all you can really do is name winners among the looks. So here goes. Goldin's pleated dresses and skirts were terrific, in particular the ones with panels of leather knit into the pleats. Likewise, coats featuring that horizontal ribbing were consistent highlights, and in fact, outerwear in general was a strength. The three-dimensional intarsia chain knits had a distinctive graphic pop, and Goldin's asymmetry was at its most convincing in short cutaway jackets and laid-back sweaters with a long, overhanging flap. More hits than misses, on the whole. All well and good then, except that Goldin is one of those designers who should be knocking collections out of the park.
8 February 2013
Louise Goldin was always pretty cool. Back when she was showing in London—as part of the same class of up-and-comers as Erdem and Christopher Kane—her sexy sci-fi knits made her brand count as one of the city's hippest. Tonight, after a two-year hiatus, Goldin returned to the fashion calendar, and she was cooler than ever. Some of that was atmospheric: Diplo did the music; Kim and Kanye sat in the front row. But mostly, the coolness was in Goldin's clothes. The collection had a casual and even sporty vibe, with stretchy knits, color-blocking, sweatshirt shapes, and NFL shoulders, and individually, lots of the pieces were very good. There were also a few looks where Goldin really nailed it: an all-white outfit that paired slouchy shorts with a knockout sweater done in a nipple-y technical knit; the stretchy tan skirt in a tire-tread print worn with a darted sweatshirt of blue and silver.In general, the strongest looks were the cleanest. Though the layering here was often effective, in particular the layered skirts, you sometimes sensed that Goldin was trying too hard to make a look offbeat, or create an awkward proportion. Still, this was a respectably confident return to the runway, and one stocked with ideas that Goldin should continue to explore.
11 September 2012
"It's space military," said Louise Goldin, of a collection whose launching pad was the photos of Pierre Cardin's graphic sixties work and body armor pinned to her studio wall. That puts Goldin in the futurist/sci-fi substream of current trend, though in her case, it's a development of the silhouette she's been working a while. For Fall, it took her into sculptural stiff-peplumed army green or navy tunics and A-line skirts with padded 3-D geometric surfaces, as well as matte-shine splicings of leather, stingray, and fox.Technically, Goldin's a genius in knitwear—her quilting effects and origamilike structures are the result of months spent working in Italian factories, coaxing the near-impossible out of expert machinists for her showpieces. It's a pulled-together, rigorous look, and the flashes of styling genius (like the sparkly cuffed red or pink short shorts peeking from beneath hemlines) set it apart from anything too literally Trekkie. At this stage of her career, Goldin has nothing more to prove on the accomplishment or vision fronts. More mundanely, though, her struggle is to convince the audience that her total look can be broken down into items that will merge into an everyday wardrobe. Backstage, she pulled out regular sweaters with bullet holders and pockets on the upper arms, cargo leggings, and lace-fine geometrically patterned knitted hosiery—all liable to help her salability. But she still needs to bend her uncompromising talent to making those items more evident.
20 February 2010
Four months ago, Louise Goldin's inspiration board was filled with tear sheets from Gianni Versace's mid-nineties advertising campaigns—the ones with the original tawny-limbed supermodels working gladiator kilts, shot by Richard Avedon. That's where she started, while factoring in a dose of baroque curlicues gleaned from a V&A exhibition and a sidelong look at the pointy bras Jean Paul Gaultier made for Madonna's 1990 world tour. To her credit, this knitwear dynamo made none of that research overtly obvious when it came to sending out a collection honed for her twenty-first-century audience.The Versace-derived pastel tones—lavender, baby blue, pink, lemon, violet, and mint green—were mixed with gold Lurex and engineered into a look that managed to include baby-doll silhouettes and leather bloomer shorts and still didn't look tacky. The skill and imagination are in Goldin's techniques. She transforms knitwear into what she thinks of as fabric, which she drapes and pleats into multilayer skirts, or wraps around the torso of a dress as dreamy, whisper-fine layers of tulle. The minutiae, too, are also knitted—using computer programs written by Goldin—down to the black "lace" edging on a fondant pink dress and the sheer tulle inserts in a gold cyber-bodysuit.Perhaps even better, though, is the news that Goldin is responsible for a new capsule collection for Ballantyne. She's a talent who started off raw and became sophisticated and lauded in double-quick time. Next, she needs to convince buyers that she has a selling collection of simplified skirts, crop tops, and leggings that have the runway attitude but can be donned without the wearer feeling like a sci-fi movie extra.
19 September 2009
Louise Goldin is the girl who has stretched knitwear to embrace the future, breaking out of all the cozy limitations suggested by the term "sweater dressing." The collection she showed was entirely in black, which was a pity—though only in that it wasn't possible to make out exactly what she was up to, even in close-up. Essentially, it was long-lined silhouettes of knit sliced with black leather, as well as an evolution into fur in a few fierce jackets that took her pieces to luxury level. "It was a long experimentation process," she said. "All these challenging things I love, but I never knew whether it was going to work or not." It certainly turned out successfully in the fox-sleeved jacket whose salt-and-pepper tweed front was knitted by Goldin herself on a machine and—at the other, more basic extreme—the knit leggings with leather stripes embedded on the side. In between, there were many complex multi-yarn sweater dresses the designer-boffin had achieved by patiently setting computers to pull wondrous innovation out of standard machines. The result looked like dark, intergalactic warrior-woman armor, but thought through in a way that might assure Goldin a future as someone who can sell items, rather than just be praised as a visionary.
22 February 2009
Louise Goldin is a unique creature: a knitwear designer whose talent really soars in summer. Her imagination literally took off this season as she approached her subject from the point of view of "remote sensors," i.e., what satellites see when they look down on Earth. "And then," she said, "I spent hours in scientific libraries researching data and being inspired by graphs, statistics, and high-tech fabrics developed for medicine."Even without knowing that backstory, there's no missing the futuristic energy of Goldin's complex, body-conscious bodysuits and dresses. Not that there aren't pitfalls in the endeavor. Shoulders built up in forms that suggested braces or exoskeletons could have swerved dangerously close to Starship Enterprise territory had Goldin not been so in control of her technique and palette. What saved her from that fate were interplays of sheer and solid fabric, an expert meting out of color (in combinations of white and nude, slowly building through ice blues to mauves), and the sense that, for all her imagination, Goldin has a genuine instinct for what a young woman might conceivably choose to put on her body. One idea was the sheer white hosiery-fine bodysuits and cycling shorts, used as a clever base for layering. Asked whether she'd sewn them from some kind of space-age fabric, Goldin laughed. "Of course not. Who do you think I am? It's all knitted."
15 September 2008
It's only her second season showing, but Louise Goldin stepped onto the runway with a reputation for pushing sweater dressing into a new zone of fashion relevance. After her small but widely acclaimed Spring show of bright, short shapes, she needed to over-deliver to impress, and she knew it. "Since the minute I finished the last collection," she explained, "I was researching Inuit culture and sci-fi, experimenting with computer programs so I could mix traditional pattern with the pixelation you'd see on a monitor screen." The result: a parade of "Space Eskimos" equipped with short multi-patterned dresses, some padded, others armorlike in the shoulder; thermal body-hugging catsuits; and fur-trimmed jersey parkas. (In a prestigious collaboration for a young designer, Pierre Hardy stepped in to design the shoes—fab patent cutaway high heels with integrated stripy socks.) The result, close-up, is a feat of engineering ingenuity that also contains a lot of sensible girl-think, which should put her in good stead as the chill winds of recession set in. Break down this sophomore collection, and buyers will find roomy sweater dresses and regular knits alongside the more demanding fit-and-flare body-con pieces and the pricier fox-trimmed jackets.
10 February 2008
It takes some oomph to extract sex, power, color, and hard-core fashion values out of a knitting machine, but Louise Goldin has it in spades. Making no apologies for knits as chilly summer evening cover-ups, she sent out a body-conscious, vibrant collection modeled by a team of girls who looked like they were about to dive into some sort of cyber-age swim championship.There was so much going on in their dresses, hoodies, rompers, tunics, and bodysuits that it was hard to keep pace. Apart from the orange, cyclamen, turquoise, green, purple, and white, there were stripes, checkerboards, transparent bands, ruching, papery creases, and ruffles as fine and fluttery as tropical-fish fins. For a first solo collection from a young designer who has just emerged from the Fashion East collective (via Central Saint Martins), that was quite a convincing score.Afterward, Goldin explained her mission to make knitwear count for something a bit more exciting than a standby cardigan: "I've freelanced in Brazil, so I know how knits can work for summer. I love it when I can put six colors into a machine and make something amazing come out," she said. "I want to push knitwear to a future vision." She's on her way.
15 September 2007