There are two stories running through Monse’s resort collection. The first half alluded to the “vacation” aspect of resort collections. This one was inspired by Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia’s travels to a villa in Tuscany, plus “1970s horse posters, and this painting from the 1800s of a sunset in Antarctica.” They fed those images into an AI to create ombré color palettes, and perhaps more excitingly, ombré color palettes made up of prints—look closely and you can see a horse or a tree hidden on a silk button-down shirt and a matching handkerchief hem with a thick leather waistband; or a lonely iceberg floating at the bottom of a sheer skirt the color of an orange sky. A classic khaki trench with crochet panels in shades of green, yellow, orange, and red was one of the highlights of the collection—inspired by their favored ombré technique but interpreted differently.
The second half of the collection was all about getting back to business. “Since COVID, we’ve been staying away from tailoring a little bit because people stopped buying suit jackets, but we began getting back into it last fall,” García said. “That’s how we started our brand; they were our bread and butter.” The designers love to play with unexpected collar placements on their jackets: wrapping them across the chest on an elongated vest, left extra long and only half-attached in the manner of secretary blouse ties on a gray jacket, or having one side of the collar jut out at an angle on a double-breasted wool herringbone jacket. Elsewhere, there were other hybrid pieces, like a three-in-one knit twinset or a coat built to look like a classic navy peacoat layered over a quilted gray blanket.
