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On the fringes of Paris Fashion Week, A.W.A.K.E’s Natalia Alaverdian welcomed guests to a lofty Haussmannian apartment on the Left Bank for a preview of her upcoming resort and spring collections. On the racks, a print of a perfect brown egg jumped out on one t-shirt, and then its contents made a surprise appearance, crisp-fried, on the back of a white tuxedo gown. On another t-shirt was a glossy and straight-up suggestive oyster on the half-shell. Both had been enhanced with AI. The designer described her process as “film meets culture meets objects.”
It wasn’t necessarily a feminist statement either, she noted, preferring to call it “ladylike with a twist.” Even so, everything started with that egg. “I was sketching this big, Fifties-inspired skirt, and I thought, I know what this needs,” she said, picking a whole-egg t-shirt off the rack. “I just wanted something that was both very familiar and also fun.”
Other pieces in the spring collection put a new spin on A.W.A.K.E’s bestselling disc motifs, rendering them as negative space, for example on a black jumpsuit with a Vasarely-like grid of circles strategically underlaid with beige. A skirt with a huge oval cut-out spanning thigh to calf was intended to be worn with the leg in or, for the daring, on the outside. Looks in beige organza looked structured yet light as meringue.
“It’s textured and cosmic and a little bit provocative,” Alaverdian offered, noting that she was aiming for a post-futuristic take on fashion. Elsewhere, she took on a staple of prep, the rugby shirt, and yanked its neckline to one side, just to keep things feeling unexpected, and sometimes teased it into a skirt with that side cut-out. A tailored top came with trousers that can be fastened in the traditional way, or flash a little (or a lot) more leg.
A tab motif the designer calls “fluffy” jazzed up tops or shimmied on pants. In the resort lineup, a red tab dress in cotton organza looked strong. So did a few black knit dresses that can adapt nicely to various morphologies. Skirts, including one in denim, were embellished with rotor-like panels. Sandals displayed a surrealist bent, with palm fronds splayed atop a trunk-like heel. Those will probably connect with fans in LA, Miami, and other fine-weather hotspots. A back-to-front denim shirt and upcycled deadstock jeans looked strong, too.
Despite the recent upheaval in online retail, A.W.A.K.E is forging ahead with some new collaborations. A new one is upcoming with John Lewis in the UK and, as of mid-October, there’s another with Le Bon Marché and 24s. In Paris and Milan, fashion has been expressing a newfound love of combining seemingly dissonant things, and Alaverdian is counting on meeting that customer exactly where she is.
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