Tess Giberson (Q9303)
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Tess Giberson is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Tess Giberson |
Tess Giberson is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
At her presentation this afternoon,Tess Gibersonadmitted that her latest collection was really just an extension of the one she’d designed for Resort. No complaints there—Giberson’s Resort collection was a rich yet concise interpretation of her experience visiting Walter Gropius's house in Massachusetts, and given that she had more to say about Gropius’s home, it was nice to find her revisiting the theme.As Giberson put it, her focus this time was on ”moments” within the house, rather than its overarching aesthetic impact. With that in mind, she dilated on details such as the lacing on chairs or the fringes of a pillow, and expanded them into recurring motifs. The fringe came off particularly well—clean and un-hippieish—while the lacing, used widely, made for some of the sexiest looks Giberson has ever produced, notably the double-slit skirt with a front panel of upholstery-like jacquard.Another winning extrapolation from chez Gropius was the deep blue watercolor striped silk, taken from a duvet, which Giberson made into a fantastic pieced-together slip dress. It looked like just the thing to wear on a hot and humid summer day—a day, you might say, a lot like this one. Pieces in bone-white mesh were just as suited to swampy weather, while micro-pleated trousers, detailed with a canny ankle slit, or ribbed knit dresses with architectural cabling about the neckline, had a more trans-seasonal durability. As a whole, this collection continued the roll that Giberson has been on—if she needs to continue making pilgrimages to the homes of great architects to keep it going, so be it.
10 September 2015
Three cheers for Tess Giberson! The designer's latest collection was notable for both its concision and its appeal. There was quite a bit going on, but Giberson managed to boil her ideas down to their essence, with nary an extraneous gesture. Her discipline seems to have come straight from her source material: Earlier this year, she visited Walter Gropius' house in Massachusetts, a paragon of minimalist architecture—all glass, white walls, and chrome. Gropius' influence surely accounted for the clean lines here and the emphasis on neutrals. But it also echoed in the textural richness of the collection. As Giberson explained, she found the interior of the Gropius house warm and sensuous and full of artisanal detail. With that in mind, she reached into her knitwear toolkit and emerged with cotton macramé shot through with metallic thread, as well as plush cashmere and mash-ups of mesh and drop-stitch.Giberson's expertise was on full display, but she deployed it with a light hand. The non-knit pieces, meanwhile, included some of this small collection's standouts—sharp front-slit leather A-line skirts, a sexy deep-V jumpsuit in crepe. The real showpiece, though, was a high-drama silk dress in red, slashed up the sides and embellished with pleats. All these cut-and-sew items boasted a strong sense of geometry—Gropius' influence again—but they didn't come off as severe. Rather, they were fully considered wardrobe go-tos that women will find a pleasure to wear.
4 June 2015
There may be no sight more mundanely depressing than gray, New York garbage snow. Great lumps of the stuff were piled up outside Tess Giberson's shop in Nolita, where the designer presented her new collection today. It made it hard to resist giving Giberson a touch of the old gimlet eye as she explained that said collection had been inspired by the beauty of frozen landscapes.Not this landscape!one thought. And indeed, Giberson had the Arctic in mind, drawing on the tundra's variegated textures for a lineup of truly sumptuous tactility. The feral fringe and the curly shearlings were the first things that caught the eye, and then the ice-like pleated silks and graphic black-and-white knits in patterns inspired by Inuit motifs. Bouclé, jacquard, ultra-fine ribbed knits, gossamer crochet—nearly everything here wanted desperately to be touched. Giberson layered her varied textures against each other in a convincing way. Her attenuated silhouettes were convincing, too, especially the sharp flared trousers and long quilted parkas, the latter of which seemed like exactly the thing to get a style-minded girl through New York fashion week, which is forecast to befreezing.Alas, those coats won't be on sale for quite a while, so…good luck, everyone.
11 February 2015
When last we encountered Tess Giberson, at an appointment for Resort, she was talking about a book she'd stumbled on, a survey of Palm Springs pools. This season, Giberson was referring to the book again—except this time she'd raised her gaze from those pools and taken in the larger "water environments" that denizens of Palm Springs had built in their backyards in the desert. The most evocative looks here conjured the mottled tone and texture of the desert and its ceiling of pale blue, endless sky—to wit, a beige crocheted singlet studded with beads, a nubby striped linen trench, and all the good-looking, very wearable pieces in sky blue stretch cotton. All that was juxtaposed with a riff on synthetics, like the pleated skirt of silver foil. Some of the organic vs. synthetic interplay was hidden in the clothes: A graphic black-and-white jacquard pattern was echoed in pieces woven from technical yarns. Elsewhere, Giberson made the point straightforwardly, as in a half-crochet, half-metallic dress.On the whole, the collection had a lot of appeal, though for every standout look, like an indigo jumpsuit or a breezy gown of pleats, there was one that felt somewhat out of sync, such as a leather cropped tank/track pant duo. There was also a certain repetitiveness to Giberson's sheer theme, although those pieces at least helped tell her story. After all, if you were hanging out in a simulated water environment in the Palm Springs desert, wouldn't you want to wear something as close to nothing as you could?
5 September 2014
Like a lot of people, Tess Giberson spent much of the interminable winter that just passed fantasizing about swimming pools. Those daydreams were the jumping-off point for her new collection, and in lots of ways, the inspiration was apt. Resort is all about daydreams of warm, sunny places and water lapping about, throwing off light. Giberson's translation of that emphasized slouchy, open-weave sweaters; sport-inspired pieces like jogging shorts; and optical, black-and-white knits and jacquards that riffed on the tile work commonly found at swimming pools. She also made nice use of mosaic-patterned crochet and a watercolor print of a palm tree that was painted by her husband. A few pieces here seemed out of place, like the stretch leather leggings in white, paneled in matching calf hair, but overall the collection struck the right breezy tone. A white denim suit, comprised of a jacket narrow about the shoulder and trousers with a barely-there flare, looked particular sharp. And a slipdress in aqua blue had a terrific, shrugged-on, diaphanous sexiness. These clothes were smart and appealing—if not as seductive as the notion of sunning by the side of a pool and then diving in. But then, what is?
1 June 2014
How do you dramatize the mundane? There's a case to be made that this is the central question of all creative endeavor—that any work of art is, at the most essential level, one person's attempt to see some common part of life afresh and give it new resonance. Tess Giberson's reference this season—the sportswear familiar to her from her rural New England childhood—was mundane, indeed. But the intriguing thing here was that Giberson really invested in that mundaneness, and honored it. There was drama on the runway, but there was a sense of humility, too. It made for an interesting tone. Giberson struck most forcefully with her excellent puffers and long, billowing shirtdresses in faded farmer check. The puffer gilets with daggered hems and a hand-knit back were the hands-down standout of this show; elsewhere, Giberson scored with her typically great hand-knits—the long shawl collar cardigans in particular—and her elongated shirting. A tunic-length button-down with a subtle stripe, worn over narrow trousers—it was a simple enough proposition, one you could even call mundane. But it had its own dramatic force.
6 February 2014
Madras. Tennis dresses. Sailor stripes and kelly green.The Official Preppy Handbookmight seem like odd reference material for Tess Giberson, but that very unexpectedness may have been the point, as the designer took on the aesthetic codes and conventions of our nation's WASP elite this season. Giberson's collection had a lot of snap: For the most part, she didn't seem to be overthinking her clothes, and you didn't need to know the conceptual background of, say, a mint silk trouser jumpsuit to comprehend the garment's appeal. Ditto the clever cape-shaped trenchcoats and Giberson's insouciantly sexy slipdresses and organza button-downs. As usual, the designer also did well with her knits, in particular those that featured a kind of knit-in, oversize perforation, and finer versions in an abstracted check pattern. A few garments did come off a little mannered, like the dresses and skirts with arcing hems. But as a whole this was a strong outing for Giberson, one marked by her ample intelligence, but not showing it off.
5 September 2013
Tess Giberson being Tess Giberson, it came as no surprise to hear her describe her Resort collection as "loosely based on the philosophy of the Bauhaus—art, craft, and technology." But despite the conceptual trappings, the clothes had plenty of unfussy appeal, like her hacked-off bombers and blazers and a great, less-is-more jumpsuit.As usual, Giberson is interested in the ways in which things are made. The season's print—from which the collection's palette was derived—is a watercolor, created by her husband, of weaving writ large. Sometimes this interest in construction can seem tricky to a fault. Her "cardigans" and dresses, for instance, don't button up the middle or the back but actually drape twice over the head, creating double necklines and effectively hanging off the wearer. But there was a simpler kind of appeal in her spidery, macramé-inspired sweater and knits with gaping cables: In effect, they say, "Someone knitted me." Giberson expressed nostalgia for the days in which that person could have been her. "I have this compulsion," she said. "I still have to touch them." To scratch the itch, she hand-embroiders a few pieces every season—here, mesh tank tops stitched with abstract webs.
4 June 2013
After several seasons of doing runway shows, Tess Giberson returned to a presentation format today, the better to indulge her arty side. The atmosphere in Giberson's studio at Pier 59 was rather intense—there was a ululating soundtrack, the result of a collaboration between Giberson and the performance artist Sahra Motalebi—and at irregular intervals, a few of the musicians that Giberson had cast as models would strike wooden blocks as they stared, glassy-eyed, into the crowd. There might as well have been a sign posted on the door: "Warning: This Collection Must be Taken Seriously."Well,hmm.It feels uncharitable to accuse Giberson of pretension—she emerged in an era of downtown New York fashion when artistic aspiration wasn't so vanishingly rare as it is now, and it's nice that she wanted to resurrect that spirit. And in the meantime, her recent collections have been very, very grounded. But the issue this time out was that Giberson's collection seemed to suffer from a surfeit of what I'll call "art thinking," and a deficit of "fashion thinking." Art values process. Fashion values the end result of process, i.e., product. So from the moment Giberson decided that the theme of her collection was "Evolution," and that the clothes would be a kind of procedural showing the development and adaptation of her ideas, she committed herself to art thinking. There were a lot of nice pieces here—and a few terrific ones, like the patchwork leggings, and a split-back blazer with a tonal floral print, or the draped black wool coat with multicolored hand-knit sleeves—but the collection as a whole proved less than coherent. Which is ironic, given that Giberson's intention was to elucidate the connections between her pieces. But that's art thinking for you. Fashion thinkers, at their smartest, know when to cut the looks that got them to the places they eventually realized they were going.
7 February 2013
The trouble with so many designers in New York's rising class is their insistence on producing entire collections of performance pieces: Red-carpet frocks and editorial looks that will turn on the stylists in the house and clothes too stiff to sit down in, but not the kind of stuff a girl can wear day in and day out. Lucky for us, Tess Giberson doesn't have that problem.Giberson titled her Spring show "Reassembled" and devoted her energies to, she said, "the silhouette, taking it apart and putting it back together to create something new." But for all the deconstruction in the clothes, they were the kinds of things we all reach for: an easy slipdress collaged together from different weights and textures of silk, an unstructured blazer with a cutaway hem in back, a special T-shirt embroidered in front with swirls of crochet and worn with skinny pants. OK, the trailing lengths of fabric on asymmetrically wrapped dresses could prove dangerous on the subway—stand clear of those closing doors—but otherwise the show was as real-world cool as the runways get.
6 September 2012