Wes Gordon has spent his early years at Carolina Herrera exploring the house founder’s origin story. For pre-fall, he flipped the script, delving into his own. His new collection is inspired by the dolls his mom kept and made clothes for as a young girl in the 1950s and ’60s. He remembers them from his own childhood, and with a new baby girl at home, he asked his mom to send him the dolls so the tradition can be extended. “Really for me,” he said, “it was revisiting my first interaction with fashion, like a Proustian kind of sensory flashback.”
The unique starting point produced a pre-fall lineup with a lot of whimsy, more than usual chez Herrera, where decorousness still rules the day even if Gordon is designing for a new generation. You can see that playfulness in the oversize gauge of the sweaters, which were designed to look like doll-size clothes knit with human-size needles, and in the giant buttons that accent the tailoring. Again, his mom used stray buttons from her own clothes for her toys’ outfits. A shift dress embellished with large rhinestone encrusted bows down the front was another doll-like touch.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. Gordon experimented with grown-up silhouettes, too. These included the pencil skirts he extended to the floor (these are about to be a trend, as you’ll know if you’ve read our other pre-fall coverage), which he paired with shirts worn unbuttoned and tied at the waist, and the gowns—a serious business at Herrera—which were color-blocked in sophisticated combinations.
