“Less is more” was the unofficial theme of Andre Walker’s latest collection. Since relaunching his label two years ago, Walker had steadily increased its scope, supplying everything from tees to outerwear. This time around, he dialed down his offering to a mere seven items: a few dresses, a jacket, a couple pairs of pants. What the collection as a whole lacked in easy accessibility, it more than made up for in singularity.
The tight focus here allowed Walker to give full expression to every aspect of his clothes. That was most obvious in his choice of materials, which included a whisper-fine wool knit faced in two contrasting colors; a dotted silk taffeta; tie-dyed dévoré velvet; and, more mundane until you laid hands on it, the supersoft cotton serge deployed in the tailoring. But the real art in these pieces was in their patternmaking: Walker is a master at disguising a good deal of cleverness in seemingly straightforward designs, as his scarf-necked dresses in the wool knit and taffeta demonstrated. They looked simple enough on, their lean silhouettes inspired by the look of legendary clotheshorse Jacqueline de Ribes, but the simplicity was a product of Walker’s having figured out how to reduce the sewing of the dresses to an absolute minimum. That’s a hard thing to get right.
Simplicity didn’t equate to a lack of flamboyance, either. There was drama in those scarf collars, in the elevated “angel” shoulders, and in the waterfall pockets on the serge jacket. The cut velvet veered the collection into more eccentric terrain, but then, this was, at heart, a collection for And Re Walker fans. Walker wasn’t so much trying to make his aesthetic some new friends as delight the intimates it already has. Mission very much accomplished.
