Natalia Alaverdian is a designer with a lot of ideas. Good ones. Her latest A.W.A.K.E. collection threaded references to her spirit animal for this season, the zebra, through a rich variety of motifs, ranging from dream-of-Africa aesthetics to ones cribbed from Vermeer’s Holland and ’80s-era fashion from Japan, not to mention a dollop of ’90s grungy-ness. Alaverdian hopped along from one association to another, racking them up on top of each other in a way redolent of those corporate brainstorm meetings where every notion, no matter how distant from the topic at hand, gets added nonjudgmentally to the dry-erase board.
Alaverdian is at the point in her career as a designer where she should be able to refine her stew of ideas into an easily comprehensible proposition, rather than continuing to serve them up brainstorm-style. This collection was full of winning pieces—fluid, duster-length trench coats; tops and jackets with sculptural pouf sleeves; checked pencil dresses; and skirts with muscular ruffles and bows—but they were swamped by the surfeit of looks that featured complicated asymmetrics, or vast volumes that felt nonspecific. The motley print and pattern here, and the way Alaverdian layered them together, added to the sensory overload. It’s not that Alaverdian needs to trim down her ideas—some looks, like the A-line floral coat paired with a mid-calf seersucker skirt embellished with rosettes, got at all (or at any rate, most) of them with clarity and concision. When she applies real rigor to her hyper-associative design process, the charm of her aesthetic comes through.
