Bernhard Willhelm’s latest collection was totally bananas. Literally: Bananas were Willhelm’s inspiration this season, and his clothing’s key motif. There were embroidered banana designs elaborated with loops of fringe, a print of a man eating a banana, three-dimensional banana appliqués, and more. The bananas were ludicrous—not to mention suggestive—which was precisely Willhelm’s point. The designer was “celebrating randomness” in this ostentatiously cheerful outing, which featured lots of sliced and distressed square-cut clothes, and zero instances of the color black.
Willhelm was being playful, but his is serious play. To engage with his clothes means engaging with the idea that people could dress in a way far removed from what we see on the street today. The naiveté of his methods—the knotting and slashing and seemingly improvisational draping—as well as his touches of applied damage, like dip-dye or shredded hems, all together suggested a uniform worked out spontaneously by a lost tribe of club kids who had decided to make a society of their own, from scratch. In said society, gender is a nonissue—you wear what you like—and it just so happens that one of the members of this new utopia is a master maker of intarsia knits, with access to hand-embroiderers in India and placement printers in Japan. Which is a roundabout way of noting that Willhelm’s clothes may look bananas, but the designer himself is not. There’s both method and sophistication to his madness.
