Kym Ellery’s inspiration this season was the 1969 work Wrapped Coast by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which found the famed land artistes covering one and a half miles of rocky Sydney coastline in tarp. The reference was legible, on a literal level, in the clothes that Ellery showed this morning, but it almost worked better as a metaphor for her development as a designer in the past year: Ellery has always exuded a vast ambition, but she seems now to have made peace with the idea that the only way to execute her ambitions is to discipline them, strap them down.
The designer’s evolved sense of rigor was nowhere better demonstrated here than in her approach to volume. She still likes her clothes to take up lots of space, but she found lots of ways in this collection to control her volumes, or concentrate them into small, significant gestures. An example of the latter were Ellery’s artfully suspended bell-shaped sleeves; one particularly good instance of the former was the navy silk sundress that she’d gathered, here and there, to create rows of soft pleats. Ellery’s volumes felt targeted and specific, in other words.
With volume playing a supporting role, much of the drama of this collection came from its fabrications. Ellery is a textile obsessive, and she deployed some outstanding ones this season—velvets printed in a sea-pod pattern; a feathery cream-colored knit fused to create weight; cloudy jacquard; crepes, silks, and shirting cottons with an ultra-luxe hand. You didn’t have to get close to the clothes to appreciate the excellence of the materials; it was self-evident from the way everything draped. Ellery’s standout material, though, was the crinkly metallic fabric she used in her show’s terrific closing looks. Ellery showed off her design maturity in those looks by not gilding the lily—the fabric was gilded enough, all it required was a simple, pencil-snug shape.
