Backstage minutes before showtime, Ottolinger’s co-founder Christa Bösch was on her hands and knees trimming the hem off a long black dress. Out in the venue, a beached shark, its bloodied mouth agape, formed the exit to the concrete runway. Even so, the message was not intended to be gory.
“It’s a symbol of fearlessness,” Cosima Gadient offered. “This is the girl who survives all the drama.” By the same token, the bands and inflated accessories on some of these silhouettes may have looked like conceptual takes on the life vest, and rather restrictive ones at that. Those bands and wraps, the designers said, were conceived as an optional add-on, for example to jazz up an evening look.
Impressionistic collection notes said, “Mine is a body in transit, intimately dressed in yesterday’s party and for tomorrow’s new beginnings.” They also evoked Calypso on the half-shell: “I am the shark drifting between cities, my dorsal fin splitting the world like an oyster.”
Once past the neoprene leggings, the collection felt like a step forward. It focused mostly on long jersey dresses intended to move from morning to night, at times cut with twin necklines, so that a shirt collar could be worn classically or shifted impertinently forward, as on the red number in look 8. Torn and shredded as they were, the silhouettes looked more minimalist than in past outings (“sometimes, you have too many straps,” Gadient allowed).
Statement pieces included a body-positive short black halter dress, crystal-studded sandals, and pieces in Ecco leather, including foiled and structured “car crash” jackets in crunch leather and one rather brazen riff on the most iconic of handbags, here in black or bubble gum pink with a base dipped in tonal thermo-molded rubber. Those came adorned with a metal “Trading Bank” credit card meant to play up a woman’s financial agency. Rounding out the collection was a collaboration with Shayne Oliver on bikinis and glasses, and with Shark Beauty (Barbie hair optional).
