“We're not talking about the year 2000 anymore. We have to throw it away, I'm sick of it,” declared American designer Conner Ives backstage at his show at The Savoy hotel.
In some ways, this was a season of reset for the designer and reflected his coming of age to sustain a profitable business.
The Conner Ives customer can now buy all the pieces they see on the catwalk in stores and online without any differentiation between them. In the past, she's used vintage T-shirts to recreate those from the runway.
“It's a reevaluation of the business: if you can't sell products that women see on the runways, what are we doing here? It took me a while to realize that idea,” the designer said candidly.
“I want to see sustainable fashion work, but we're in the Wild West now, we have to try things,” he added.
This was Ives' most stylized collection to date, touching on the pageantry of American debutante balls and Truman Capote's swans, which seem to inspire designers on both sides of the pond.
He designed simple but beautiful black dresses with carabiners or skin-provoking zigzag lace to avoid being pigeonholed as the T-shirt or Y2K designer.
However, Ives' flirtatious touch was still in every piece: a snakeskin jumpsuit with an attached short gold sarong; an enlarged shearling scarf worn around her arms with a frayed denim skirt and a sheer white wedding dress for the finale with embroidered wired headphones from her manufacturer's neighboring factories in Mumbai.
“Sometimes the United States is put in certain categories, which many times deserve it, I am not defending the country in any way. But it's nice to see an elegance in America for a country that is always the butt of jokes,” the designer said.
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