A more richly provisioned fashion brain than this pretty poorly equipped one mentioned Koos van den Akker after this morning’s Sportmax show. A quick Google (that blessed refuge of the ignorant) search confirmed her hunch. The collaging of bordeaux, ochre, and olive rectangular panels at the arm of a layer-wrapped coat and blouse, rhomboid panels on the bodies of felted wool coats, the closing section of camo-contour stitching and the coated woven pieces here—along with its Moroccan-flavored tilt at analog maximalism—all had something in common with the précis of van den Akker’s denseness that Google delivered. But then, we’ve seen touches of this at Céline, too.
Lancer lapels undone at the top to loop then droop over themselves, skirt hems slashed at the side to reveal an underlayer of plissé, and vertical zippers used to cinch waistlines were just a few of the style tics in this busy collection. That busy-ness—accentuated by long-length wide-weave netting tabards that felt carried-through from last season or the hexagonal heels of the shoe boots—seemed sometimes at odds with the volumized minimalism of the silhouettes. It was hard to speculate who this full-look woman was. However once dissected and considered in isolation, there was some highly appealing outerwear here, including the intarsia mink capelets and coats, the coats of rectangular tile-design leather patchwork, and one high-collared black coat with a wonderful swoosh of white piping and stitching at neck and shoulder.
Mr. van den Akker, who died last year weeks after falling at his sewing machine, provides this review’s conclusion as well as its intro. Unfortunately in retrospect, he was most widely known for knitting Bill Cosby’s famously full-on sweaters. In 2012, van den Akker told Vice that he was never entirely enamored of Cosby’s commissions. Those sweaters, he said, trod “a very thin line between absolutely awful and something of genius.” This Sportmax collection, notable for some as-you-would-expect stand-out outerwear, never threatened to trouble either side of that line.
