Peter Do (Q8076)
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Peter Do is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Peter Do |
Peter Do is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
Peter Do’s spring show took place at Paris’s Musée Guimet, home to one of the largest collections of Asian art outside of Asia. While it jibed with the designer’s Vietnamese roots, it was a choice not short on ambition. Seats sneaked around century-old statues and intricately carved portals; on each chair, press notes were paired with text (a poem? an essay?) written by Korean American author Mary H.K. Choi, along with a Bangkok guide featuring the favorite spots of designer Philip Huang, who had assisted Do in researching ancestral indigo-dyeing techniques in northern Thailand. Guest were gifted a bottle of 000, a custom scent created for the occasion. It was quite the production. A live performance capped off the show, continuing well after it had ended.The dyes, made from leaves, tree bark, and earth and activated by fire, water, and air—as Do explained backstage—produced irregular ombré patterns on gauzy fabrics, from which the designer crafted a few standout pieces, including a men’s bomber and two women’s slender coats, for the show’s finale. Bookended by these artisanal looks and the opening designs, which played on Do’s repertoire of fluid deconstruction, the collection struggled for a cohesive rhythm. Shredded denim and sweats alternated with sporty black satin puffers layered over tailored suits from a new line called 168; long men’s shirts, made from poplin or cotton with a crumpled-paper texture, were worn askew across the torso, while a Vietnamese-style lithe tunic in dark green chiffon with abstract prints (one of the collection’s uncomplicated, finest pieces) was layered over matching slender trousers.Do tried to pull out all the stops to make his Paris outing worthy of all the effort (and investment) he had clearly put into it. However, while the city offers global visibility to press and buyers, it’s far from an easy platform for a young brand to navigate, despite its apparently welcoming and generous reputation.
1 October 2024
Peter Do named his new collection Áo Dài and dedicated it to his late grandmother. An áo dài is a traditional Vietnamese uniform consisting of a long straight-cut tunic worn over a pair of matching elastic waist pants, usually in silk; it’s an outfit he remembers her wearing when he was a young child. At the presentation he held in a gallery on Rue de Richelieu in place of the show he staged last season, a mannequin wore a version of the look in white velvet dévoré, its pattern modeled on one of his own abstract paintings. Do paints when he’s stressed, he said.So he’s painting a lot these days? He laughed at the question, but the day-to-day nurturing of an emerging brand while simultaneously trying to revive a heritage one (he’s also the creative director of Helmut Lang) is no joke. Add that fact to the tender feelings he has for his late grandma, and maybe that’s why he was focused on ease and drape, after working to establish his tailoring signatures for so long.The black-and-white abstract print pantsuit inspired by the same painting as the velvet dévoré, for instance, was softened by the matching wrap skirt tied loosely at the hips, and he cut his signature oversized blazer jacket in both padded black satin (like bed clothes you can wear outside) and a gray knit (for a cozy sweater feeling). There was also a cool Japanese black raw denim suit that with time and wear would take on the lived-in uniform qualities of an áo dài.Otherwise Do focused on his modular dressing ideas. He’s made versatility a selling point of his clothes since the beginning. Here that meant everything from lining the sleeves of the jacket in his “Suture” suit with functional buttons should, say, a woman want to flex her biceps and her power in a board meeting, to a silk twill lining fabric minidress sold with a waistcoat-slash-apron dress that can be worn two ways: with the buttoned vest in front, or with the v-neck back in front. In the gallery, small tablets played videos that demonstrated the pieces’ multifunctionality.After the press preview, Do said he planned to open the gallery to the public and walk people through. It’s a unique gesture in Paris where crowds in the thousands line the police barricades outside other shows, propping up the mega brands with their online content (and ear piercing screams) but not being invited inside. “Right now I’m not trying to make PD the next billion dollar brand,” he said. “Because of my new challenge at Helmut, I want to protect this.
I want it to feel even more personal and special to me, where I feel maybe not financially, but creatively free.”
27 February 2024
“Well, he can cut a mean pair of trousers, can’t he?” New York’s Peter Do brought his collection to Paris for the first time this morning, to put some distance between this show and the Helmut Lang one he did back home a couple of weeks ago, and to introduce his work to the European crowd. The trouser comment came from a Peter Do first-timer who is not so easy to please on the subject.Do is a designer with big ambitions. Early on, he told me he wanted a creative director job at a European label, and he made it happen (though Helmut Lang is now owned by Japan’s Fast Retailing). But making a killer pair of pants is also high up there on his to-do list. At a time when fashion’s designer-as-content-maker contingent is expanding, Do holds actual honest-to-goodness clothes-making in higher regard than most. “I want to make grown-up clothes,” he said backstage.To start, what that meant here was you didn’t see the silly short-shorts that were all over the Milan runways. Do cut his blazers into horizontal sections, placing a band of silk twill lining with subtle logo details between a top and bottom in summer-weight wool. Some jackets were tucked into pants with a similar treatment. If that’s a runway styling trick that may not make it in the real world, many other pieces have good odds, like the jackets cropped at the midriff and the blazer vests with exaggerated shoulders. Then there were those great looking trousers. The most ambitious were the pairs with vertical slices down the front that revealed a bold lash of red underneath. On the softer side, a pair of halter dresses—one knee-length and the other to-the-ankle—had provocative sheer insets in front and elegant draped backs. The draping and twisting felt new for Do, an expansion of his vocabulary.Sprinkled in were pieces from his Banana Republic collaboration, due in stores on October 10. The khaki trench with a removable shearling collar and a two-in-one chunky ribbed sweater added a more easy-going vibe to the show. Just don’t call them casual. There’s nothing casual about Do’s drive.
26 September 2023
A new Peter Do look for every day of the year. That was the designer’s concept for these photos. There are 351 of them, so he’s only 15 days short. The remarkable thing is, all 351 outfits were put together with just 20-or-so different pieces. “We took two days with the team to just play, and tried them on in endless possibilities,” Do said at his Sunset Park studio. “This is something that’s going to be permanently offered every season, and a lot of these things are items that we’ve sold since day one.”Despite three successively bigger runway shows, and industry buy-in that found him shortlisted for both the Woolmark Prize and the CFDA Designer of the Year award in 2022, Do sat out New York Fashion Week in February. He declined to speak publicly about his absence at the time, and even now he doesn’t care to go into details, but he is calling this collection a “good reset.”It could’ve been a case of too much, too soon. The pressure of the runway can sometimes lead an emerging designer away from their founding principles, to say nothing of draining resources, both financial and energetic. “This is one of my favorite collections,” Do said. “I had time to edit down what I want to say. It feels like I found my voice, in a way. It feels like me.”The pieces he created for the Woolmark competition form the foundation of the lineup. It’s a tight group of essentials, many featuring the single contrast stripe on the left arm that counts as the Peter Do logo. Very mix-and-matchable are two Loro Piana wool blazers, one oversize, the other giant; an array of chunky ribbed knits made using Zegna Baruffa yarns, including the dickey-bib that turns crewnecks into turtlenecks; the belted waistband trouser and pleated asymmetrical skirt from season one; and a leather coat with the boss versatility he’s built into the brand from the start—its zip-off hem converts into a wrap skirt. He also designed a selection of easy-wearing separates in wrinkle-free Japanese viscose with price points lower than the rest of the collection.What you don’t see: superfluous embellishment, print, or anything in the way of color. The black and white palette and emphasis on tailoring will play into the internet’s current preoccupation with quiet luxury, but Do rejects the label. “Now that we have this foundation set, I’m excited to go back to creating newness.”Come September he says he’s likely to be back on the schedule, though New York or Paris is still tbd.
Evidence of that in-process collection was pinned to boards in his office. The other signature he’ll be sticking with: genderless design. He’s fitting every look on both men and women.
26 April 2023
Over the weekend, the singer songwriter Moses Sumney was seen striding up Bowery in the oversize, overstitched jacket that appears here in look 49, Do’s platform boots adding a couple more inches to his 6’3” frame. After three years producing womenswear, two dominated by the pandemic, the designer is adding men’s to his offering, and that chance sighting, pre-runway reveal, seemed to suggest that it’s going to be a thing.Yesterday’s show opened with a men’s look: the double breasted jacket fastened with a single button over a white shirt, both with a large triangle cutout exposing a flash of muscled back, over a pair of full satin pants with open side seams that tapered at the ankle over those signature boots. The model was Lee Jeno of the K-Pop group NCT who has 3.4 million followers on Instagram. Celebrity influencers will play their part, but more important: Do’s exacting, even methodical approach is equal to his ambition.GQ’s Will Welch got a preview of the designer’s menswear and testified: “Right out of the gate he landed what he wanted to say.”As with his women’s, tailoring is central to Do’s aesthetic. In fact, the offering is more or less unisex, in addition to being quite sexy. “During the fitting process we try everything on both, 80% is pretty genderless,” he explained. “A lot of things we make [for women] generally fit men anyway, so now we’re moving toward small, medium, large sizing, instead of 34, 36.”For him, for her, for them: over the course of 60 looks—this was one of New York’s bigger shows—Do set out his vision. It involves deconstruction in the form of suits slit open at the hem to reveal their inner workings, minimal leaning ornamentation like tone-on-tone suture stitches over seams, and the two- or three-in-one versatility that he’s built into his work from the start. Waistbands can be adjusted to accommodate different sized hips and clever pleated skirts are attached to belts so they can be open and closed, almost like curtains. Shirts can play it straight, meaning buttoned from collar to hem, or they can be worn wrapped around the waist for the undone look he favored here.Another novelty, this one on the sustainable tip: a tank and pants in what looked like patent leather were made from discarded shrimp shells, a food industry waste product. Taking in the show yesterday were fellow designers from Phillip Lim to the couturier Ralph Rucci. Yes, Peter Do is definitely a thing.
14 September 2022
Peter Do was single-minded backstage before his show. “I was a bit more selfish this season,” he began. “I wanted to do fashion that feels the most me, the most personal. I really like the suit. I like that it takes time to make, that you don’t need to buy many, and that when you find a good one, it becomes your safe space. I want to be that for women.” Some might call Do’s approach counterintuitive. After all, we’ve spent the last two years getting very comfortable out of suits. But a glance back at the pre-fall collections and a look around at the early New York shows says something different. The suit is back.Do’s exacting nature came across in his palette, which he restricted to just four colors—black, white, camel, and gray. His cuts were more expressive. Many of the day suits were color-blocked in spirals, so they looked different front to back. For evening he showed a trio of monochrome three-piecers that combined trousers, waistcoats elongated to the ankles, and double-face coats worn shrugged off the shoulders to expose bare arms and back. Jackets scaled way, way up into one-size-fits-all coats made a big statement, a requirement for outerwear purchases. We’re likely to see those on the street this time next year.In the end, it wasn’t as narrowly focused as Do advertised backstage. Breaking up the tailoring were long pleated skirts of the sort that we’ve seen elsewhere this week and a pair of minimal, slightly A-line long dresses. Slouchy ribbed sweaters with his tattoo logo down one sleeve were paired with cool wide-leg jeans with tuxedo stripes. The rip on one thigh was an unnecessary gesture. But Do is only on show two and the instinct was right: It doesn’t all have to be so serious.
15 February 2022
Peter Do gave a hand-written note to each and every one of his guests. In the letter, he likened designing his new collection—the first he’s showing on the runway—to making Pho with his dad as a teen. Do father and son were Vietnamese immigrants in Philadelphia, and cooking the traditional soup was a weekend bonding exercise. “A good Pho is reduced and edited, to an essence” he wrote. “It is comforting and it feels like home… Welcome to our home.”Set in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in an open lot next to the East River, Do’s debut was one of the most anticipated shows of a revived New York Fashion Week. The spectacular Manhattan skyline across the water made his point, which was about insisting on his place and that of his team as Asian-Americans here in New York. Hate crimes involving Asian-American victims have soared in the city, as across the US, during the pandemic.Do has been at the stove, to extend his Pho metaphor, for three years. Buyers picked up his first collection for spring 2019, so he hasn’t been toiling in obscurity, but he was operating at a remove from the runway glare. He uses the word functionality to describe his work; “making your life easier while looking good,” is how he puts it. The genesis of this collection was that first outing. Though he’s been a minimalist from the start, when analyzing his early work with more experienced eyes, he decided to pare it back and cut out its excesses. The four-piece suit, which he’s made a signature, now features a lighter-weight pleated skirt than in seasons past because customers had told him that there was too much fabric around the waist.Then he went further back. “We’ve been thinking about the people that came before us,” he said backstage. Looking at photographs of his grandmother’s church outfits led to an exploration of the traditional Vietnamese ao dai, which he added lapels and closures to for a side-buttoning coat. An early snapshot of his mom and dad in which his mother holds a rose inspired the rich embroideries on the finale pieces.Do brought his whole team out for a bow. Up until this point, it’s the product alone that has driven his label’s success. Now that his followers can put faces to the name—we counted about a dozen people during that bow, and they’re also appearing in a wild posting campaign for his fall collection—that success seems likely to grow.
8 September 2021
When this collection was coming together I was traveling a lot in cars. It wasn’t something I did growing up. Before moving to the US from Vietnam at 14, I was rarely inside a car. Then, growing up in Philadelphia, we had three cars. From the first collection, I was fascinated by the idea of protection. We decided to go back to that and make clothes that mimic being inside a car.We developed a fabric with a Japanese mill that was a bonded charmeuse. We bonded it until it felt like the shell of a car in terms of texture and consistency. The crushed texture in crazy car colors like cranberry, teal, and silver. It was really beautiful… stiff but lightweight. We really experimented with the fabric by crushing, pleating, and washing it over and over again to give it a lived-in quality. It was a very fashion with a capital F collection. It had a specific theme. I remember watching films about cars, reading books about cars. We don’t really do that anymore.A lot of shapes were carried through from spring 2019 but done in a wintery stiffer fabric. We tested the theory of one big collection from spring to fall as one main story, which is what we still do today. Part of that was because of budget reasons, as we couldn’t do a lot of new patterns. But overall, I think this approach works best for the brand.
24 August 2021
The main thing wasIrving Penn: Small Trades. I was thinking about where Peter Do could begin, and it seemed like a good start. There were so many things in that book that speak to all of us… uniforms on everyday people. What was fascinating about that book was seeing a different side of Penn’s work from the glossy, glamorous photos. It was about functionality. You can see the wrinkles and texture from the aprons being folded down and rubber boots worn for protection. We wanted to explore those aspects of dress as a foundation for Peter Do. It was where the four-piece suit came from. Skirt, pants with blazer on top…a chef’s uniform. That was our touch.It was our first season, and we rented a showroom in Paris. It was a friend’s sixth floor walk-up apartment. I remember it was so hot and there were flies everywhere. We rented racks from a local place and carried 150 pieces from New York up all those flights of stairs. Before we got there, we had no appointments. We emailed everyone and no one got back to us. Barneys was the only confirmed appointment. Then Dover Street Market Ginza came by. Through word-of-mouth, people started showing up.We were closing the showroom midday one day because we didn’t have any appointments and as we were heading downstairs, someone from the team yelled that some “fashionable women” were coming up the elevator. So, we quickly ran back upstairs to open the showroom and it was Dover Street Market London. By the end, we closed out with half a million dollars in sales and nine stockists.Looking back, there are a few things that we’ve carried forward every season. The idea of transformation became integral to the language of the company. It was still very experimental… many things didn’t work. There were a lot of SKUs in the first season, and it probably showed we weren’t as confident. Now we’re better at editing.
24 August 2021
Are those lace flames licking the hem of the trousers in Peter Do’s look-book-opening suit? And is that a giant feather brooch on the jacket’s shoulder? A millennial minimalist (say that five times fast), Do is branching out. Having built up his daywear vocabulary over the last couple of years—he launched his label in 2018—he’s turning his attention to clothes for after dark. “I felt like it was the right time to dress up, to be seen, to say that we’re here,” he said on a Zoom call.This puts him in league with other designers thinking along darkly glamorous lines for fall. Twelve months of living more or less like shut-ins has spawned a collective urge for shine, skin, and sexy high heels. Do’s contributions to the trend extend beyond those touches of lace and feather brooches. If it’s shine his women want, they could try a metallic foiled denim coat or a silver leather jacket. A pair of long skin-baring slip dresses were cut with a technical precision that called to mind early Narciso Rodriguez. As for sexy high heels, Do’s come with optional ankle bangles for a touch of kink.This newfound instinct for embellishment aside, Do’s gifts as a designer are of the engineering variety. Anyone can add decorative fringe to a jumpsuit. It takes a clever patternmaker to create pieces like floor-scraping shirts that fold up and over the shoulders in dramatic swoops; the jacket/cape hybrids modeled here by Anh Duong and Maggie Maurer; and the rib-knit halter and shrug sets that he showed with another signature: tailored kilts worn over sharply cut matching trousers. As his business grows—which it is bound to do; he’s a crack tailor—elaborating on these two-in-one concepts will continue to distinguish Do from the rest of the fashion pack.
8 March 2021