Rachel Antonoff (Q8967)
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Rachel Antonoff is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Rachel Antonoff |
Rachel Antonoff is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The Rachel Antonoff fall 2024 look book stars Jenny Slate and a look-alike puppet. “The vibe is ‘all the world is a stage,’” she explained from her Brooklyn studio. “It’s that feeling you have when you’re dressing up for a crush; I thought we should be bringing that same energy to everything.”Antonoff’s sartorial raison d’être is always joy—her signature prints are never just florals or paisleys but frog dissections, pasta bows, and a terrific new pattern with a hidden cat hidden—but lately she has begun to explore different ways to communicate that feeling based on color and silhouette alone. Like the matching knit sets with scalloped edges—there’s a cardigan, a wrap skort, a slim flare trouser, a sheath, and a bolero—in a color palette of classic shades like black, red, baby pink, periwinkle, and toffee. “My dream is for this to be sort of like Juicy Couture, something that you could wear to the airport and not feel like you look like shit,” she added. A look where Slate was wearing the trousers in toffee with a Brussels Griffon–themed intarsia sweater, layered underneath a glossy vegan-leather red trench coat, did indeed seem like the perfect airport fit. Acid-washed denim cargo pants were also a highlight.The crush mindset also resulted in a few va-va-voom looks, including a short sequin dress with a slight blouson-style bodice and a fitted skirt, and another in pink velvet with a shirred and gathered skirt adorned with satin bows. They both had very youthful—and alluring—open backs, perfect for date night. Antonoff even seems to have accidentally zeroed in onBratsummer, with a neon-green quilted slip dress with metallic fringe straps that the wearer should absolutely let fall over their shoulders because they don’t care.
25 July 2024
Rachel Antonoff has been thinking about butter. Butter as the ultimate condiment that makes everything better, as an easily attainable luxury and indulgence. There was a simple tank top with a crochet trim and the image of a salted butter bar on the chest, which was worn with a wrap skirt with a “floral” print of charcuterie ingredients (figs, mandarin oranges, a block of cheese), and a sweetly romantic print of little slabs of butter in heart-shaped doilies that decorated a white denim jumpsuit worn with a matching cotton shirt.Antonoff loves a faux floral print, meaning it takes a while to register the tomatoes, the bean and raspberry plants, or the lettuces that populate her easy dresses. But there were also proper floral prints, some inspired by the edible flowers that have been making an appearance on cookies as of late, and others inspired by tulip gardens. The latter was used on a mid-length dress with a shirred bodice and contrasting ribbon straps, the skirt trimmed with an iron fence design complete with a sign to “Please Curb Your Dog.” Though her aesthetic may seem unorthodox, her dresses and separates all seemed perfectly suited for summer garden parties or opulent Italian vacations whose only purpose is to eat one’s way through the country.That the model in the lookbook is India Bradley who dances with the New York City Ballet is part of the butter of it all. “Ballet feels like the butter of dance, you know what I mean?” she said from her Brooklyn studio. “There is a butter of every category of thing, it’s the thing that’s really the topper, the perfect most luxurious thing that you feel just pushed that category over the edge.”
22 January 2024
Vegetables, cell phones, calculators, horses, a street cart cup of coffee, bowtie pasta, prize ribbons, caviar. These are all the things that play a starring role in Rachel Antonoff’s fall collection, where the designer continued to explore the idiosyncratic world she’s built with her namesake label. And yet, among the easy printed dresses and intarsia knit pullovers and cardigans, Antonoff was looking to break new ground. “I'm particularly excited, because I feel like for a really long time we've been told it's got to be super specific: People don’t want solids from us, they only want prints,” she explained during a recent Zoom meeting. “But people seem to be really liking this, and I'm very excited that we can not only do a solid, but we can do a black solid.”The black solid in question is a knit set made up of a cardigan and a wrap-skort with a petal-edge trim in contrasting white. But elsewhere there was also a black dress with a multi-ruffle detail at the shoulders—each ruffle trimmed in gold—and a pink slip dress with spaghetti straps and an empire waist. Okay, so that last dress did feature a print of a Champagne tower on the front, with teeny pearl embroidery standing in for the bubbles of fizz, but it was subtle enough that it basically counted as a solid—at least in Antonoff’s world.For fall, she also expanded her categories, offering a puffer coat in an artichoke and squash blossom print (calling all the girlies who were excited about tomato girl summer!), and a toile de jouy print of characters fromThe Sopranos.The puffer also comes in a bright metallic pink. “This is our first time experimenting with a solid because people really like the printed puffers,” Antonoff said, “but I feel like if we’re going to do a solid, then let’s make it shiny.”
21 September 2023
Rachel Antonoff wants you to let your body do the talking. “We’ve found our sweet spot these days is a comfortable silhouette in a real conversation print,” she explained. “A thing I love about conversation prints is the conversation doesn’t always have to be with someone—I can be sitting super bored on the subway and it’s nice to have something to look at even if you don’t have your book or whatever. It’s nice to have elements of discovery even for yourself.”For her fall lookbook, she took that desire for connection to Paris, along with her mom and her Aunt Mindy. The three of them went to restaurants and the Eiffel Tower dressed in Antonoff’s latest collection. Many of the photographs were taken by passerby. “You have someone take your picture and you realize there’s a little bit of kindness everywhere,” she said. Many of the prints revolve around food—tomatoes in particular—though it is by happenstance that many of the images were taken in restaurants or food markets (what else does one do in Paris but eat?).After years of being told to “calm down” and “quiet” her prints, she’s realized that people are coming to her for her wildest ones. There’s a jumpsuit in a red and white plaid-and-floral plastic picnic tablecloth pattern (you know the one), a short sleeve babydoll dress with pintuck details at the bust and a print of pink flamingos decorating the skirt, and a spaghetti strap summer dress with an abstract floral that upon closer inspection is in fact frogs being dissected. “It’s my favorite style of conversation print, which is like, ‘oh that’s a pretty print… oh no, that’s blood and guts!’ It’s so fun and subversive,” Antonoff added, laughing,But therewerestill floral prints to be found, on a slip dress with a shirred bodice and ties at the shoulder, and on a wrap halter dress with a collar and belt in a “sprite” motif. “They’re literally sprites just dancing on vines.” The best floral, though, wasn’t a floral at all but tomatoes, especially on a v-neck cardigan with green and yellow tomatoes, and on a slip dress that was a slight nod to those ’90s sari-inspired dresses with a paisley print on the body and a contrasting larger print around the hem. Her take had an all-over cherry tomato print with a border of colorful heirloom tomatoes on a lace collar and the hem of the dress.
11 June 2023
Stuck in your home, trying on clothes, with nowhere to go? Rachel Antonoff can relate. For her fall 2022 collection she delves into a Miss Havisham-esque journey of characters played brilliantly by Cole Escola. Character studies are par for the course at an Antonoff outing—she’s staged plays, musicals, concerts in the past—but few pull off the nuance of a beautifully demented Antonoff muse quite like Escola, whose brand of eerie comedy amplifies the surreal nature of the designer’s jewel-print and cookie-print pieces.The soul of it all comes through immediately; that’s Antonoff’s strength. But over the course of the pandemic her collections have risen from twee separates into real clothes for cheeky customers. (See her seafood tower dress, a veritable hit of summer 2022.) While the comedy of her toile of nude fleeing men remains, this season she’s expanded her mixed-stitch knits, easy tailoring, and beloved jumpsuits in rich colors, creating a strong baseline above which the RA muse can layer in their own attitude: kooky, happy, free.
30 September 2022
Maybe you spent the past weekend bingeingSearch Party. Or maybe you’re catching up onCurb Your Enthusiasm? Surely you’ve seen the latestSaturday Night Live, hosted by Ariana DeBose with Jack Antonoff as musical guest and a hunky “Dr. Fauci” (actually Antonoff’s father, Rick) on guitar? Whatever you’re watching, you’ve probably seen the stars of Rachel Antonoff’s spring 2022 look book on screen. Antonoff has created a visual sequel to her fall 2021 look book, which starred her mother, father, brother, dog, and herself, only this time her family is played by comedy geniuses. Bob Balaban takes on the role of Rick Antonoff; Susie Essman is mom; John Reynolds is musician Jack; and Sarah Ramos plays Rachel. A friend’s pup was also cast to take on the all important role of Rachel’s dog Lafitte.The sitcom analogy works well in the Antonoff universe. Her work is interlaced with her family life and celebrates the mundanity of growing up, of sibling inside jokes and family traditions. In the past, she has glamorized school pick-ups, group vacations, and school proms. This season she apparently toyed with calling her collection “the energy of Rick Antonoff riding Splash Mountain himself on a business trip.”Let’s backtrack: The big vibe of Antonoff’s spring offering is of living life unabashedly to its fullest. She summed it up by recounting a story from her teenage years, when her dad went on a business trip to California and decided, between meetings, to go to Disney Land and ride Splash Mountain alone. (He has the photo souvenir to prove it.) “Whodoesthat?!” asked Rachel, implying that more level headed—read: more boring—people would have taken the two hours to tan, chill, network, or nap.In that spirit, Rachel cut everything boring or normal from her collection. Custom patterns of seafood towers, sub sandwiches, and caviar tins adorn flirty little dinette dresses and unisex camp shirts. There are almost no solid colors; every neon collared tank is dotted with flowers, every navy knit intarsia’ed with a picture of a baby lamb. “I really want to play and to have a little silliness this season,” she said.She’s not the only designer to think that way—about 3,000 miles away Jonathan Anderson recently extolled the values of being silly, turning a pigeon figurine into a purse. Antonoff’s work is markedly different from Anderson’s, but the idea resonates: “This collection is about the bigger question of how you spend your time,” she said.
“If you have 20 minutes are you going to Splash Mountain or are you working out?” After the two years we’ve had, maybe we should all turn off the TV—with apologies to the stars on Antonoffs’ look book—and take a plunge on a wild ride.
19 January 2022
The termbrand DNAhas been bandied about a lot during the pandemic. Designers the world over want to go back to their roots to prove the strength of their original ideas—and to offer something consistent and timeless at sales. But few do brand DNA with the fascinating kitsch and beautiful strangeness of Rachel Antonoff. For fall she’s reworked many of her classic shapes, including full-skirt mini- and midi-dresses, animal- and food-pattern intarsia crewnecks, rainbow puffers, velour jumpsuits, and sweet dinette dresses. Doubling down on the concept, she cast herself and her family—mom Shira, dad Rick, brother Jack, and dog Lafitte—in her look book, which was photographed by Jack’s girlfriend, Carlotta Kohl.Rachel’s name might be the one on the label, but her brand has always had a group-project energy about it, with her family never far out of frame. The already close bunch became closer during COVID, forming a pod and popping from their northern New Jersey home to Jack and Rachel’s apartment in Brooklyn to a house on the Jersey Shore. All the Antonoffs together again under different roofs took Rachel back to high school and her neighborhood carpool, and got her thinking about the chaotic ways moms would dress to scurry the kids to school: a red robe with patterned leggings or a nice top and sweatpants, neither of which are too far from the Zoom dressing we’ve grown accustomed to over the past year.Even with nostalgic nods to her own past, Antonoff’s idea of fashion remains of the moment. Her irreverence is her best quality; she’s not afraid to have a nude man doing the splits drawn into a toile, knit a white fluffy cat into a sweater dress, or stick some rhinestones onto the cowboy boots her dad wears with a leopard-print velour tracksuit. It’s not serious. It’s not stuffy. But it is fashion. In one image, Antonoff stands in her childhood bedroom beside her dog Lafitte, wearing a checkerboard cardigan and pink quilted miniskirt, clothes cascading out of a dresser behind her and album covers tacked to the wall. When so much of fashion delivers a just-out-of-reach aspiration—the life not lived—it’s refreshing to see fashion that represents a life well lived and loved.
12 April 2021
In the Before, fantastical clothing came with panniers, bows, and poufs, and enough tulle to drown any sorrows. Clothing that was over-the-top in volume and silhouette was lauded for its boldness and flippant nature. “The world’s going to hell,” people would joke. “Why not wear a cake topper?!” Well, now we are in hell, and those sarcastic garments just don’t seem to get the job done.One of Rachel Antonoff’s strengths as a small, independent designer has been imbuing fantasy into regular, everyday clothes. For spring 2021, Antonoff decided, as she’s done many times before, to “do the most” with her clothing. The whole collection was almost entirely printed with graphics of PB&J sandwiches and olive prints, Pauline de Roussy de Sales’s illustrations of dogs, and the logos of all of Antonoff’s favorite haunts in New York City. It’s all very much too much, cut into wearable silhouettes that her customers have long loved, like roomy jumpsuits, shirtdresses, and simple maxis.The look book was photographed on Long Beach Island, an 18-mile sandbar off New Jersey’s southern coast that functions as a summer retreat for many families in the New York metropolitan area. Models grin in front of the Custard Hut and lean on the entrance to Harvey Cedars Shellfish Co. Antonoff’s palette conveniently complements the pastel-hued and kitschy feeling of a New Jersey summer retreat—anyone who has been to LBI knows that even though it might masquerade as a place of American normalcy, there are plenty of citizens trying out extreme summer looks while packing into the hot pink Nardi’s Party Bus after too many Sex on the Beaches. Which is to say that in the Before, we needed permission to let our freak flags fly. That behavior—“too much”—had to be cordoned off to a special place and a certain time. As we recalibrate for the future, may we live every day like it’s an LBI holiday, in our wackiest dress with an ice cream cone and pearl-encrusted Crocs.
15 October 2020
“It’s alot,” said Rachel Antonoff of her fall 2020 collection. She wasn’t being sarcastic; the idea of “doing the most” inspired the designer’s OTT prints and palette this season. The most most? Maybe a tabloid-print trench that relives the scandals of the past decade in a sharp, A-line shape. Antonoff also crafted purple and yellow polka dot skirts—“a very Samantha Jones palette,” she said ofSex and the City’s provocateur—farfalle-print separates, and velvet suiting in rich emerald green. The look-at-me ideas didn’t end there; see: acid green plaid frocks and a vaudevillian tuxedo jumpsuit worn in the lookbook by Jessica Joffe.But for as much as Antonoff loves to add flair wherever possible—especially in her bagel- and greyhound-intarsia knits—her designs have been trending toward the pragmatic. As customers respond to her flirty dresses, so has she rethought them in contrasting florals and newer, slightly sexier silhouettes. Midi skirts, mesh layering pieces, and a snuggly plaid robe coat number among Antonoff’s totally wearable offerings this season. She’s wise to build out the core of her business—and to do it without losing any of the kooky patterns and free-spirited joy that make her clothing so special.
9 February 2020