#sies marjan

MyTOP 10fromNYFW Fall 2020 ready-to-wear

1: Dion Lee
2: Rodarte
3: Brock Collection
4: Area
5: Peter Do
6: Beaufile
7: Monse
8: Snow Xue Gao
9: Sies Marjan
10: Oscar de la Renta

Sander Lak’s stuff at the Sies Marjan studio in Manhattan, as photographed by Marcelo Gomes.

“Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Sheila Hicks, Jim Henson; these are the artists that come to mind when standing amongst the sheer abundance of stuff, spools of fabric, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at Sies Marjan. It’s easy to fall under the influence of Lak’s influences. I caught myself wondering if the bottle of Gatorade Glacier Freeze on his desk was a source of inspiration—the crystal-cool aqua liquid, so similar to some of Lak’s laminated, holographic designs. Sitting next to his bottle of Gatorade was a pink My Little Pony, a travel-sized tube of Clinique moisturizer, a copy of Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers, purple highlighters, spearmint gum, and an exhibition book of the artist Sharon Hayes, titled, “There’s So Much I Want To Say To You.””

“Last February, Sander Lak’s fifth collection for Sies Marjan revealed the creative director’s chromatic kinship with Douglas Sirk, the filmmaker whose work is synonymous with 1950s melodramas and the saturated miracle of three-strip Technicolor. “I am contriving to paint with a strange brush,” noted Sirk, in a 1978 Film Comment interview. Two decades prior, François Truffaut remarked of Sirk’s work, that his use of color was “vivid and frank,” and “varnished and lacquered to such a degree that a painter would scream.” Truffaut continued: “They are the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics.”

Vivid. Frank. Strange. Plastics. The same words could be used to describe Lak’s vision, who sent models—women and men—down the runway in a parade of lush materials; each garment acquiring heightened brilliancy from how Lak’s designs seemed possessed by contrast. By conflict. By blue as it bleeds into red. The unlikely sophistication of a crinkle. And how startling it is to experience the emotive properties of a leather trench colored intestinal-pink. 

Shimmering metallics in russet, puce, rainbow—one dress resembling the green patina of oxidized copper—were wrapped in black tulle or layered under psychedelic shearling in mint and merlot. Varying degrees of purple, from morning glory to plum and periwinkle, felt somehow hypothetical in their range. There were dull shades, too; a whole spectrum of sea urchin.

While the show’s hued carousel of hammered satin and crêpe de chine was appealingly languid, floating across the runway with an air of indifference, there was tension. Little torments. A sense of anxiety typified by Lak’s signature cinching and folds. Those errant puckers and rosettes. What he calls “the phonetics of clothes.” These details that make a cashmere sweater seem self-possessed but not prim or supercilious. Cashmere sweaters that are dark and twisted. The Fall/Winter Sies Marjan runway was pure melodrama, insisting on visual climax after visual climax, and bringing to mind Lauren Bacall’s blue flush in Written On the Wind or Jane Wyman’s cherub face—prismatic, stricken—in All That Heaven Allows.”

Profiled Sander Lak of Sies Marjan

With beautiful photographs by Marcelo Gomes