The color palette was stripped back—white, tan, brown, black, a deep green, with little pops of orange, butter yellow, sky blue. The clothes indeed seemed complicated at first glance, and then there was that moment of recognition—“Oh it’s just a shirt with a loop hanging from it; oh it’s just a skirt with a circular cutout.” Then everything was familiar again. The knits remained a standout in the collection, as did a simple butter yellow dress with snap details at the front. The pieces invited you to wear them whatever way you want. “I think both of us are very drawn to that sample sale vibe of, ‘there’s something that looks like a pile of rope on a hanger,’” Latta explained. “We’re like, ‘What is it?’ Obviously we have to deal with the idea of hanger appeal, but I think for us, letting these things have a kind of mutability and playfulness, like the scrunches in all these different ways, feels inherent to our curiosity.”
So it was in fact playfulness that was the theme of the season. Back at the dinner, everything was going the way fashion dinners go. The designers stood up and thanked everyone for being there—an editor sitting next to me commented that it felt like we were at their wedding. As they were finishing up their speech, another voice came through the speakers. It was the actor and comedian Kate Berlant, who stood from her table and walked into the space in between the two long tables where the dinner guests. “Guess what, you thought you were having a little dinner? It’s a fashion show sweetie!,” she said. She asked Loren Kramar to do the music, and did her runway walk. Then she bgan calling on other guests—Camila! Cohl Mohr! Ella Emhoff! Blake Abbie! Steff Yotka! Susan Cianciolo! They all took their turn—some of them in the latest collection, some in archive pieces, others in their own clothes—doing their best walk while the audience cheered.
For the first time since Vogue started covering Eckhaus Latta’s collections, the images that accompany this review are not the actual images of “the happening.” Since last season they pivoted to doing market during men’s fashion week and thought since they’d already taken care of that, and shot a lookbook, why not do something new! On their Instagram account they had been posting short guerrilla-style videos taken of themselves and their friends doing a runway walk in mundane places—a bodega, around a pool, outside in front of a nondescript building—and tagging them #ELInternationalFashionWeek. Did that have something to do with it? “That’s something we’ve been doing for years as a joke when we’re traveling, or at weird fabric conventions with friends,” added Latta. “It’s just something we do very spontaneously. And we thought, what if we did this as the show?” Walking out of the dinner with a group of editors everyone agreed that it was the most fun they’d ever had at a fashion show. And more crucially something that could only happen in New York.