Fuck, I feel old. So, so old. I am standing amidst a heaving, ebullient, and very up-for-it crowd of people on the ramp going down into the loading bay of the Tempodrom performance center in Berlin. We are waiting to gain entry to the venue for Shayne Oliver’s Anonymous Club show. It’s safe to say I have never felt every passing year as keenly—or not so keenly, more accurately—as I do at this very living minute.
Beside me is a towering, lanky kid who couldn’t look more Berlin if he tried (this is a compliment, btw) wearing what looks like to be a pair of riveted No Faith Studios raver denims, with an electric blue tipped fake furry fox tail hanging off of them. Meanwhile, behind me, is the super cool (and very nice, and very talented) Gerrit Jacob, the designer who has been serving up all sorts of fab looks for Dua Lipa. If we were waiting to get into a club and not a show, that club would be Berghain.
Now I am sitting in my seat, with an ominous circular lighting rig lowered to almost floor level in front of me, and the soundtrack of chirping birds, the kind of sweet refrain you might hear from a little bluebird about to alight on Snow White’s hand, has slowly turned into a grinding, incessant, cacophonous wall of sound which is making every single one of my fillings tingle. Like I said: I feel so, so old.
But I will tell you what’s not old, and definitely isn’t aging any time soon: Oliver’s brilliance at working intuitively within the idiom of the everyday—jeans, sweats, tees, hoodies, and parkas—and making it all magical. It’s been a while since I’ve had the pleasure of clapping eyes on one of Oliver’s shows. His big, bold Hood By Air extravaganzas in New York were essential viewing back in the day, IMO. But since then Oliver has decamped to Berlin and founded his new-ish label Anonymous Club. New York’s loss has been this city’s major gain.
The label’s name has a kind of delicious irony, of course, because anonymous is not something that he could ever be. That inventive and original cutting of Oliver’s stands out a mile. (Sorry, kilometer: We are in Europe.) It’s evident in this collection’s dominant silhouette, which sees the collar and shoulder line of any given garment morph upwards into a dramatic cowling hood, all of that controlled, almost sculpted volume up top contrasting with what’s going on below. Some of the pieces might have the Anonymous Club logo emblazoned on them; some had Shayne Oliver, in script, more discreetly placed on the back.
As to what was below all that, it would be shorts, lots and lots of shorts (they’re a thing here in Berlin). Sometimes it might mean wide track pants, perhaps printed with a grid of interlocking bands. And other times faded, washed jeans whose perfect slouch starts from the hips and doesn’t give up until their hems hit the floor. Also of note here: the volume injected puffer gilets—one model holds hers in one hand as she navigates the circular runway as if she’d just won a prize fight—and the soft draping and folding of Oliver’s slinky (there is no other word) dresses.
Afterwards, backstage was a melee: Models hanging out having a good time, still dressed in their looks—who could blame them; they looked great!—and a rush and a crush of people wanting to congratulate Oliver. As for him, the show, and its reaction, was vindication of what he has done with the label. “Usually with Anonymous Club, I work with specific fabrics and tweak them, and see where it takes me,” he said. “This time, I wanted to invoke some imagination, because one thing I think we’re missing right now is a bit of a fairy tale, a bit of innocence, especially now. It feels”—Oliver started to laugh—“recession proof, and also, that dreams are important.” That explained the Brothers Grimm like hooding and also the almost Prince Charming vibe of the shoes, low black leather pumps which used to be called court shoes way back when.
The twist, said Oliver, was to take the whimsy but make sure it didn’t detract from the wearability of the clothes. He puts that down to Berlin. “I get to take my time a bit more here, to work on wardrobe pieces,” he said. “The concept of the collection is heavily rooted in the design, so I think about the garments themselves, and then I get to think about how to present them. I love New York, and Paris, and I worked in Milan for years,” he went on to say, “but I just think there is a sense of reality here that’s more interesting to me the older I get.” To which I can add: Me too. Old I might have felt, but after seeing this, I also felt good.
