You’ve just gotten home from the club. On the way to your apartment, you stopped by the corner deli and picked up a sandwich—if you’re one of the lucky ones who lives by a deli that’s open that late. Let’s say it was a classic New York chopped cheese. So you sit on the couch and settle down to feast. Cut to the next morning: You wake up, foil wrapper next to you and still in last night’s clothes. It’s all good—you didn’t lose your phone, it just needs charging, and your clothes are only a little wrinkly.
When Neil Grotzinger started working on their spring lineup, the theme evolved into a survey of the city’s nocturnal animals. Not vampires, Batman, or Amy Adams in that one great Tom Ford film, but those deeply embedded in club and rave culture who feel most at home when the lights are off and the music is going oontz-oontz-oontz.
Grotzinger engineered their silhouettes to create an impression of heftiness at the hems without necessarily adding weight. This came in the shape of godets inserted into the skirts of billowy clubby dresses or pant legs, which also featured a panel connecting both legs from under the crotch to enhance that illusion of weight. The result of these experiments was sometimes grotesque but always charming and creaturelike, an oxymoron that, as it often goes with Grotzinger, was nothing but intentional. “I wanted to create a creature proportion in response to how heavy and intense this [party] culture has gotten,” they said, “to the point where going to Basement [an underground techno club in Maspeth, New York] or something is a sort of ceremony.” It can be cathartic to experience so much time on the dance floor, the designer explained. There are certainly more unconventional places where one can have an epiphany.
Another goal with the architecture of the season’s silhouette was to create the illusion that these creatures are leaning forward ever so slightly. You know the way some techno people dance, moving mostly their torso and wiggling their arms but are static with their feet? That same kind of chaotic yet repetitive movement was what Grotzinger tried to emulate with these bottom-heavy bottoms. The result was playful and a little severe, and it worked.
The prints in this collection featured photos Grotzinger captured while on their own nighttime adventures. There was a glass case of poppers, the kind New Yorkers can find at sex shops and now the occasional deli, sitting next to blurry lights taken during Uber rides home and buildings under construction. What Grotinzger was getting at here was profiling the irrational reality of these nightlife dwellers and the contrasts between their lives in and after the club.
Back to our opening scene; Grotzinger pressed and stitched down the creases and wrinkles that would occur had their models slept in the clothes. The button shirts were the most successful pieces in the collection, as familiar as they were puzzling. Natural when you’re in them, but strange for an outsider—not entirely different from the cult that is nightlife.
