Collectibility was the organizing principle of Byron Lars’s spring show, presented in Ginny’s Supper Club at the Red Rooster in Harlem. It was the Barbie trend, Lars explained, that set off this line of thinking. Few people in New York are more qualified than Lars to speak on the subject of Miss Plastic Fantastic: Mattel asked Lars to create a single Black collector’s Barbie in 1996; the project was so successful that he created one a year through 2011. “I understood that a lot of Black women longed for representation in the doll space,” Lars said, and explained that each of his 15 Barbies (one of which was carried down the runway by a model) had “a different skin tone, hair texture, and, of course, outfit to reflect a spectrum of Black fashion sensibilities.”
If there was any carryover from Lars’s collaboration with Mattel to his latest In Earnest collection, it had to do with the idea of getting dolled up; almost everything that went down the runway had a bead or some sparkle. Muchness was the message, and it was often achieved by layering. Having looked back at his Barbies, Lars noted that “there were so many pedestrian things mixed with aspirational aspects; beads and utilitarianism and all that stuff kind of compiled together. Here there are lots of Barbie-like things, but it’s not a Barbie collection.” Indeed, it looked very much like his previous offerings.
If there was little forward motion here, there was a sense of community. Some of Lars’s designs were styled with illustrated and hand-appliquéd T-shirts by his longtime business partner, Sheila Gray, that she said speak to one’s “inner doll.” Hats by Lisa McFadden Millinery added another layer to the story. “There was a very deliberate play on the coexistence of ‘Sunday Best’ with everyday clothes, since I have a soft spot for a good church hat in general, but never more so than when one is rocked with pedestrian staples, like a T-shirt or cargo pants,” said Lars.
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