Phelan McDermid Syndrome Foundation (Q8880)
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organization in Venice Gardens, United States
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Phelan McDermid Syndrome Foundation |
organization in Venice Gardens, United States |
Statements
Amanda Phelan debuted her first Phelan collection for Spring ’16, which doesn’t feel like that long ago until you consider just how much has changed since then. Department stores are scrambling to stay relevant; designers are switching up their show schedules; and Instagram has become a viable shopping tool, to say nothing of how the political and cultural climate is affecting our buying habits. So, Phelan stepped away for a few months to figure out the best path forward for her young label, and like others before her, she decided that doesn’t necessarily include a fashion show. Instead, she’s prioritizing a direct-to-consumer, see-now-buy-now business model and a new, very high-tech e-commerce site (think: 360-degree photography and video), which launches in two weeks.As for the clothes, Phelan reined things in to focus on her strength: knitwear. Every piece in the Fall collection is a knit, but if that sounds one-dimensional, zoom in. Phelan’s knits are mind-bogglingly innovative, from the simple-looking rayon pleated skirts—which reverse to velvet knit and are surprisingly fluid—to the boxy T-shirts in reversible double-face jacquard and the pencil dress with a loopy, origami-like hem. Phelan explained that dress comes off the knitting machine in one piece, and the loops are created by using a dissolvable yarn that melts in steam. “It’s really beautiful to watch the process, actually,” she said. In the past, if you saw that dress on the rack at a major retailer, you might never hear that story. But now that Phelan is in direct contact with her customers, she can share those behind-the-scenes details and get their feedback, too. “When you’re an online, direct-to-consumer business, you can pour all of your time and energy into understanding your customer,” she said. “You don’t have time for that when you’re preparing for market or a fashion show. It was all in the retailers’ hands.”After meeting many of her customers IRL, Phelan understood a few new things: First, that her knits needed to be longer and leaner, and second, that women of all ages are buying them. It’s impossible to design a collection that resonates with every woman of every age, but Phelan’s simple, elongating silhouettes should certainly come close. The real trick is in the fabrications, though: Her stretchy knits skim and flatter the body, and the ones developed with Lycra have sleek, hold-you-in abilities—something many of us can appreciate.
Still, for all those high-tech details and the practical motivations behind Phelan’s relaunch, the clothes aren’t without heart. Techy knits can read a bit cold, which is why she added squiggles, wood-grain lines, and sketchy markings, all developed from her own drawings: “After the election, I just wanted to revert to this childlike innocence,” she said. “I think everyone is looking for a sense of renewal. There’s been so much negativity, and I became invested in using lines as a quick way of recording an emotion, and getting back to this feeling of wonder and fantasy.”
17 August 2017
Amanda Phelan hasn’t been at this Fashion Week thing long. Her show last night marked the debut of only the third collection from her namesake label. Yet she’s made herself a welcome presence amid the maelstrom of shows, presentations, appointments, and whatever noun serves to describe theYeezyspectacle, thanks to the contemporary dance performances that accompany the rollout of her clothes. These additions could be written off as a novelty element—something like Snapchat bait—but the keen attention given to them each season, and Phelan’s eagerness to set the performances against her collections, speak to something deeper. Perhaps it’s our collective desire to consider fashion within the larger cultural context, to see collections as more than clothes qua clothes.This was Phelan’s strongest collection thus far. Its main failing was one of nerve: As a whole, these clothes didn’t seem to be speaking to anything in the world beyond themselves, despite what the dance opener would have you believe. Not many collections can hit that mark, and maybe it’s unfair to ask Phelan, in her brand’s infancy, to aspire to ambitions beyond making inventive, well-wrought, salable pieces. She did that this season, notably in the lineup’s opening round of pencil-slim, engineered knit dresses that blossomed with volume or movement close to the hem. These were knockout frocks, to be sure, and the graphic knit looks that followed, with their innovative dissolved yarn fringe or bands of contrast-color ribbon, made a likewise strong impact. But, still, you wanted more.Phelan was certainly stretching herself for Spring. Riffing on the work of painter Caitlin MacBride, she created lovely prints that expanded on the artist’s explorations of the look of folded fabric. She took a first stab at tailoring, cutting one particularly sharp-looking suit in a fabric nearly as reflective as a disco ball. And she pushed her signature knits, not by getting more technical but by finding fresh approaches to old techniques such as Ottoman and basket weaves. The overarching theme was of component parts, of process revealed by the magnification of its elements. On a conceptual level, Phelan applied that theme to a deconstruction of femininity, taking it not as a finished state but a thing constructed via gestures such as corsets and bustiers. That inquiry was interesting, as far as it went.
Three seasons in, though, it seems fair to ask Amanda Phelan to imbue her clothes with the same emotional intelligence that came through tonight in the moving bodies of her dancers, each of them submitting to the rigors of the choreography in the service of a feeling.
9 September 2016
One of the challenges of reviewing fashion shows, of late, is to disentangle spectacle from collection. Amanda Phelan makes that task particularly hard. For Fall, as she did in her debut for Spring ’16, Phelan collaborated with the dance troupe Vim Vigor on a performance to run alongside the presentation of her clothes. Like last season, the dancers were utterly mesmerizing, this time executing a kind of balletic parkour on and around the three ramps erected onstage. The performance was well worth seeing, but it overshadowed the clothes a bit.That’s not to say that Phelan’s sophomore outing disappointed. But it did demonstrate that this designer is still coming to grips with the vocabulary of her brand. From a technical perspective, what Phelan produces is breathtaking—this season, for instance, toying with the tension between the technical and the organic, she created a fair number of jaw-dropping pieces. To wit: the filament-fine accordion-stitch sweaters, which showcased Phelan’s prowess as an engineer of knit, or the show-opening looks in reflective brocade finished with holographic sequins, or the twisted leather dresses printed to look weather-beaten. Other examples could be added to that list. Which is a problem, actually. It made sense last season, as Phelan debuted her line, to send out a bunch of showstoppers; as she settles into her business, though, she needs to start focusing her collections on a few key ideas, and look for ways to deploy her out-of-the-box craftsmanship more matter-of-factly.Phelan is perfectly capable of a level-headed look: Here, for example, she showed several varieties of flap-sided skirts and pants (the dancers wore the nicest versions, in fact) that made for appealing and approachable wardrobe go-tos, and her fitted intarsia knits were among the items that boasted a streetwise versatility. That said, it would be nice to see Phelan finding more opportunities to distill her expressive tendencies into gestures, rather than so often dialing them up into whole looks. She seems to be heading in a more grounded direction, but it’s worth underscoring: A few showstoppers will do.
13 February 2016
Get ready to hear a lot more about Phelan: The new label by formerAlexander Wangknitwear designerAmanda Phelanlaunched this afternoon with a bang. The show, seated theater style, was led off by an extraordinary four-woman performance choreographed by Vim Vigor Dance Company founder Shannon Gillen, and it concluded with the assembly, onstage, of models clad in some of the most innovative looks to come from a young New York designer in quite some time. The rapturous applause was earned.The dance wasn’t just for show. As Phelan explained, “movement” is key to her brand’s identity, and she wanted every element of her first collection, and its presentation, to speak to that theme. Its plainest expression was via the knits, which displayed a staggering level of technical invention: There were knits popcorned and puckered, ones gossamer sheer, and others patterned in graphic intarsia. The jaw-dropper was an accordion-knit silver dress that came off armor-like from a distance, but was revealed to be pliable and lightweight when studied close-up. Phelan was clearly stretching her knitwear muscles here, but she spent the wealth of her Wang experience in another way, too: Aside from a few longeurs, these were street-ready, commercial looks.Phelan’s movement theme also extended to the woven pieces. It was evident in an abstract brushstroke print, and in here-and-there fringe embellishment. A long cotton skirt was slit up the front to accommodate a long stride, and the blinding metallic pieces captured motion through light. Phelan made and remade the same point, but the sheer variety of ways she found to tell the same story kept the storytelling from feeling heavy-handed. If anything, the quibble here was that the looks the dancers wore, also by Phelan, weren’t included in the official runway collection. The dancers’ high-waisted, wide-leg cropped trousers demonstrated movement in the best way possible—through the furious aliveness of bodies.
12 September 2015