Zankov (Q3733)
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Zankov is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Zankov |
Zankov is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
You might call her Kim Gordon, but Henry Zankov would likely prefer goddess. (So would I, tbh.) Zankov went to see Gordon’s band Sonic Youth this past summer—green with envy here, I cannot lie—and he was transported back to the 1990s and to an era of alternative and grunge rock that has remained profoundly evocative to him. Let Proust have his madeleines, Zankov has Sonic Youth’sWashing Machineto get nostalgic about. “I was in high school and college listening to Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins,” said Zankov. “I’d moved to America from Russia, and American culture was confusing to me. I didn’t understand it. But somehow, through that music, I found my voice.”For next spring Zankov is certainly speaking loud and clear. He served up a fantastic mix of cropped sequin cardigans; slacker-ish board shorts; slouchy, trailing check pants; long, sinuous tubular skirts and tank dresses; and, boldly striped beachy sarong wraps which can be worn as skirts, dresses, or majorly big wrap and then just keep wrapping scarves. All of this was finished off with flip-flops, flat thong sandals, jewelry from current CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist Presley Oldham, and some very, very Kurt Cobain-esque white framed shades by Selima Optique.The ’90s and the music it produced has been one of the most revered—and revisited—eras by fashion, and for good reason; it was a sonic and style mashup of look, attitude, hipness, and a revolt against the status quo that was blindingly brilliant. We all know the names of the designers it inspired (hello, Mr. Jacobs) and the fashion revolution it provided the soundtrack to (enter Kate Moss, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Melanie Ward,et al). You can revisit it any day now by watching our very own about to be released documentary seriesIn Vogue: The 90s.Except, in Zankov’s case, it wasn’t a literal ’90s re-tread that he was after, or interested in. Instead, and perhaps unsurprisingly for a designer primarily creating textured sweater dressing, it was thefeelingof that time, and the emotional resonance it has for him, that he wanted to capture. “It was a magical, rebellious moment for me,” he said. “And I wanted to push the visual language of Zankov a bit further, still focusing on stripes and pattern and color, but really trying new techniques.” That he can intuit a freshly inventive and nuanced take on those years says much about his talent as a designer. It’s all down to two things.
9 September 2024
Quite recently, Henry Zankov, the talented designer of all things knit-y and sweater-y of the label Zankov, saw the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris. A quote on the wall caught his eye. “It’s really beautiful,” he said the other week at a preview of his fall 2024 collection at his live and work space in Brooklyn. “It goes something like this: ‘I bought a house just so I could bury my sweater here.’” Anyone at today’s presentation who also might have spied said quote would have had their mind whirring like crazy trying to figure out the financial outlay. Given how superb Zankov’s fall collection is, you’d need many, many houses for the many, many sweaters (and the rest; this is a whole knit world) that you’d want to keep for posterity. (I know, I know, we can all but dream. Maybe we’d better stick with the many, many sweaters and just have the one place to rest your head—and your knits.)Given the kind of emotional connection that was at work here—the depth of feeling for what he is designing and for what you might want to wear—Zankov named this collection (appropriately enough) Hold Me Closer. “I wanted that sensation of being hugged, of having someone to be in your clothes with you,” he said. “It’s also that feeling of protection, but at the same time, I don’t want the wearer to feel overwhelmed.” How that played out was as a greater emphasis on the three dimensionality of what he designs—an approach which embraced scarf-ing and blanket-ing, for want of two better phrases. But that is essentially what was going on here—a rounded, cocooning sense of comfort with planes of knitted fabric softly folding and draping around the body in a way that never looked cumbersome or clumsy, merged with a silhouette refrain that was elegantly long and sinuous.Zankov opened his presentation with a chunky scarlet knit worn to slip-slide off the body, teamed with a fuzzy textured skirt in dusky pink. From then on, we had the uber-light merino wool paneled oversized sweaters in ochre or purple. Burnt orange was used for a robe coat and a dress with a matching oversized scarf with pockets, all magicked up from a yarn that had been knitted twice over. Another excellent and inventive technique was used for white and black pieces striated with stitches, which every now and then delightfully bubbled up like pom poms.
The twinset was reinvented as a chunky brown and ecru marl cardigan and matching sweater, edged with electric blue and worn with slouchy flannel pants. Zankov included a few—industry term coming up here—wovens (i.e, non-knitwear pieces) to round out the look and his world. A loden robe coat was a standout over a zingy acid green knit and rib trousers combo.Inspiration-wise, he might have been looking to artist Nathalie du Pasquier, who also cofounded the Memphis group. Looking to her work inspired him to use gray for the first time, to add to his own richly original palette. The lean lanky shapes came from the kind of clothes favored by the French chanteuse Barbara, renowned for her gamine crop and risqué lyrical content. (Touchingly, Zankov mentioned he connected with her because her look reminded him of his mom when she was back in St. Petersburg in the ’70s.) Yet all that aside, what you come back to here is that this is a designer with a strong sense of craft and technique, married to an aesthetic that resonates because it’s thoughtful and considered—and his. There can surely be no higher praise this particular New York season, which has occasionally had the distinct whiff of the derivatively familiar about it. All that was familiar here was that Zankov looked exactly like, well, Zankov.
12 February 2024
You don’t need Henry Zankov to tell you that this season he was thinking about “seduction through color.” One look at the slim short-sleeve maxidress in thick stripes of turquoise and tangerine orange is enough to make one weak at the knees. “This season I wanted it to go further; I still wanted to use color to bring you in, but I also wanted to show the body a little bit more through stitches, through new techniques, and also through new silhouettes,” he explained.Walking through the gallery space that housed Zankov’s spring presentation felt a little like being at an illicit party: a barely there yellow knit sweater with airbrushed details in tropical green and azure; a midi-length long-sleeve dress with sheer stripes interspersed between red-orange and rose pink stripes; a tank in blue, black, green, and yellow vertical stripes worn with a matching-but-not skirt in the same color and pattern except he switched the yellow stripe for white. It was as bacchanalian as color and texture can be. Some color names this season included rhodolite, chrysocolla, sunstone, hortensia blue, and bergamot yellow.“The collection is called Lighten Up, so I wanted the color to feel light and to glow from within,” said Zankov. “Through the use of open stitches or light yarns, I wanted everything as light as possible.” The designer has experimented with wovens in previous collections, and this time he really landed on some wonderful shirting pieces. Those included a shirt with stripes of varying widths and shades of blue and yellow, and a truly great pair of long shorts constructed from a shirt tied around the waist in red and green and blue striped fabric. A white cotton jacket with a retro stripe detail at the chest and matching cargo pants looked quite at home among the more colorful options.Zankov also expanded his womenswear offerings with dresses that could work for a variety of occasions, like an open-weave orange sleeveless tank dress embellished with blue sequins and a decadent long cream dress with an open-weave design and horizontal stripes in yellow, black, green, and red. (Although at their core, Zankov’s clothes are for whoever feels attracted to them; he called these “women-forward but gender fluid.”)Zankov’s artist collaboration this season was with the Brit Helen Bullock, whose illustrations of fruit appeared on a number of pieces in the collection, including a tank featuring a cherry and the wordripewritten underneath.
“It’s kind of a little innuendo without being too obvious,” he said with a sly smile.
11 September 2023
For fall, Henry Zankov was in a languid state of mind. “I was thinking about seduction and nurturing,” he said during his presentation at a gallery space in Tribeca. It’s easy to be seduced by the soft, enveloping textures of a gorgeous knitted sweater, but he wanted to push it more. “It’s more about expressing a subtle sexuality through the colors, which are bright and intense,” he said, “How do we seduce not just through exposing our body, but through color, pattern, materiality and texture?”The seduction began with dresses and separates in cutout intarsia knits that created a kind of DNA strand pattern. A zip-up jacket in cobalt was interrupted by a curvilinear brown stripe that followed the shape of the body: “A way for us to play with shape and introduce our version of outerwear,” said Zankov. One of the best pieces was a collaboration with the artist Daniel Reynolds, whose work hung on the walls of the gallery where the presentation took place. Reynolds works with large, expressive fields of color, and one of his pieces, a white square furiously scribbled with neon pink, the expressiveness of his mark perfectly recreated through screen print, was on a delicate white sweater with extra-long sleeves.Skirts were embroidered with sequins and then screen printed. They had an alluring opaque shine, especially when paired with oversized sweaters. It was a little bit grunge, a little bit cozy country. In that same vein, an oversized sweater robe and maxi dress had the instant appeal of heirloom blankets. One in chocolate brown and the other in grey, they both featured the designer’s signature variegated stripes in the season’s bright color palette. They were fuzzy mohair alpaca on the surface, but were lined in wool on the inside to avoid itching. “A lot of the materials this season are more extreme,” Zankov said. “They’re more brushed, they’re softer, the stitches are a bit more loose, so it’s this idea of being hugged, being embraced.”
15 February 2023
On a recent Sunday, the garden of the NYC hot spot Saturdays was the low-key setting for Henry Zankov’s spring presentation. Among the models wearing his colorful knits were throngs of friends, well-wishers, and department store buyers excited to greet the designer. It felt like a late-summer party with friends.Founded in 2019, the label is known for its graphic sweaters in bold color combinations and easy-to-wear silhouettes that the designer has been slowly building upon and expanding season after season. He seemed most excited about a collaboration with his friend painter Philippine de Richemont. Zankov took de Richemont’s gestural paintings of “the human nongender form” and transformed them into a pattern that appeared in an easy yellow dress made from a high-twist cotton fabric with a light weight perfect for summer. De Richemont’s faces also appeared as embroidery on a couple of woven button-down shirts, done in colorful yarns. “People keep asking about [expanding our categories]. Last season I started experimenting with woven material, and this season we wanted something a bit more hand-done,” Zankov said. Also new was a great pair of wide-leg chinos.Zankov was inspired by Ukrainian Jewish artists who share his heritage, like Sonia Delaunay, Louise Nevelson, Kazimir Malevich, and Aleksei Kruchenykh. “I never want to be literal; instead I pulled from what’s inspiring about the visual language of each artist,” he said. That resulted in a fantastic geometric pattern done in shades of aquamarine and indigo that was digitally printed on a very fine rib and turned into a swingy button-down shirt and skirt.“I want everything to feel really, really light but also be strong visually,” said Zankov. A knit tank and matching long shorts in an orange terry with thin red and white stripes achieved that goal, as did a horizontal short-sleeve top with a zipper at the neck and banded sleeves in shades of bright green, canary yellow, orchid, black, and white. Zankov’s signature blocks of color appeared on an oversized sweater, a pair of shorts, and a short-sleeve maxidress whose secret seemed to lie in the orchid color that appeared on half the ribbed neckline. “I know the color’s right when it feels joyful,” he said, and there was no shortage of joy to be found in this collection. Zankov is certainly one to watch.
14 September 2022