Fashion’s beating heart is transience, but when it chimes just right a fashion movement can span generations to become a permanent source of inspiration. Astrid Andersen was barely born when Buffalo began, but tonight the Danish designer looked lovingly back at the mid-’80s to the early-rave, Ray Petri–pioneered London style movement.
Georgia Howorth wore Nike 270s, an Amazon-sourced Stetson, an Astrid logo T-shirt, plus a silk shirt and pants printed with a photo of her original vintage Buffalo model mother, Jeny, taken by Mark Lebon. There was a wild abandon of plaid-on-plaid oversize workwear/streetwear pieces, tracksuits and work shirts in iridescently rich jacquard weaves, hoodies and shawl-collar robe coats in nubbly teddy bear wool, and tracksuits inlaid with tweed panels, all of it consistent with the permissive eclecticism of back-in-the-day Buffalo, but identifiably Andersen, too. Her stylist, Elgar Johnson, puckered the pieces with colored crystal brooches to emphasize the anti-conventional toughness of a collection that incorporated skirts and sheer Sophie Hallette lace–inlaid T-shirts for men. A high-waisted gold-zippered black puffer gilet—a biker gilet?—and the incorporation of argyle were two new-feeling additions to the Andersen vocabulary that she had drawn from the old.
So why look back to look forward? Andersen replied, “When I look at the Buffalo era it is about this open-mindedness, not thinking about race or gender or anything, breaking all boundaries.” That’s a slice of the ’80s that 2018 can most definitely make use of.
