It’s been a benchmark year for Maryam Nassir Zadeh, what with a sell-out J.Crew collaboration and a pair-up with ba&sh, which together gave her particular brand of downtown cool some major exposure. These “extracircirculars” were anything but a distraction when it came to creating her namesake collection for spring, however: “I felt more clear about what I wanted to make,” she said on a walk-through. Zadeh was just as sure about the material she wanted to use—it’s a silken spring at MNZ and a colorful one. The designer described her palette as being pulled from “ice cream” (or sorbet) hues like mango, citron, guava, pistachio, and cherry, which she balanced with brown tones, in a sort of equivalent to a milk-chocolate ice cream dip.
Moodier hues were mainly used for seriously sexy bikinis, unisex looks in plaid (an unexpected trend this season), and denim. But the real draw of the collection draw were the light and bright pieces which were layered and combined in interesting ways in the lookbook by the stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington. Among the day-to-day options are the label’s best-selling dance pants, this season with a long swatch of fabric fringe hanging from one hip (a detail that also appears on a skirt). Shirting options that look femme rather than “borrowed from the boys” were inspired by vintage favorites. A leather bomber in a shade of iridescent pink you might find in a bottle of decorative “pearls” in the baking aisle was paired with a sheer chiffon wrap skirt with a generous slit. “I still have an affinity for transparency,” noted the designer, who made shrunken blouses, with a slightly ’40s air in the same material. She used habotai for weightless bra tops that you’ll want to shop like pick-and-mix candy.
A side-laced ruffled cotton skirt has a substantiality that Zadeh carried over from her J.Crew collection. “Sometimes I feel when we make MNZ garments, they’re a little bit ethereal; they don’t have that weight in the depth, but I feel like this has that,” she said while holding the skirt, which was made to be taken out on the dance floor. Also fun are the many slightly structured sheaths with a decorative bands of fabric under the bust and the floaty chiffons with inset godets in contrasting colors. One wafty number was “tamed” with an insert of a Japanese woven organza, while clear sequins on cotton were overprinted in blue-and-white, nodding to the pottery Zadeh collects. Many of these frocks sit on your body like a dusting of powder.
They’re “just romantic and easy,” said Zadeh. “I feel like it’s very hard to find good dresses these days, [and] sometimes if you want to dress, you just want to feel like it’s just chill”—in terms of both aesthetics and price tag. It’s no secret that the prices of designer clothes are skyrocketing, or that as they do, perspectives on value are shifting along with them. Of working with J.Crew, she said, it was “so awesome to make something that will last for a long time that’s [also] inexpensive. I mean, if you can snatch it and hold onto it and you cherish [a piece of clothing], I feel like that could be luxury.” Maybe it’s not only beauty, but luxury too, that’s in the eye of the beholder.
