“I feel every day when I’m in the garment district it’s a battle, so I wanted to do something that was a little bit autobiographical, and I didn’t want to do a full take on military,” explained Andrea Mary Marshall of her tightly edited, body conscious collection. It so happens that in telling her own story through garments and in self-portrait Polaroids (Marshall also maintains a fine arts practice), the designer is speaking to everywoman. Protection is a main theme of the season, with a majority of creatives adopting a soft, defensive take. Marshall is among the few who have taken a proactive, offensive stance. Hers was modeled on Joan of Arc, and expressed most strongly through tailoring’s soft armament. “Just as Joan of Arc wore men’s armor into battle, the modern heroine suits up to show up,” she wrote in her press notes. (The designer said she had recently read Anne Hollander’s excellent Sex and Suits.)
Marshall has been on an ’80s kick for several seasons now (before the decade became a full-fledged trend) and remained in that lane for fall. Grace Jones, Madonna, and Jean Paul Goude’s photographs of Farida Khelfa were on her moodboard, and she had been thinking particularly about the work of Claude Montana and Azzedine Alaïa (see the second-skin hooded jersey dresses) without being directly referential. As at Norma Kamali, the bodysuit provided a base to build around.
The designer further developed the outer bra cups she introduced last season, showing them on a snug coat dress and a blazer paired with trousers that flare widely from the knee. Despite this element of surprise, Marshall’s work has a trim neatness that feels very can-do American, which is quite fitting as the brand takes its name from the Salon in which John Singer Sargant’s portrait of Madame X, born Virginie Amélie Avegno in Louisiana was exhibited. The sexual innuendo in the painting caused a scandal, and there’s a bit of come-hither frisson in this collection, too, suggesting that maybe love (or at least lust) can conquer all.
