Matthew Williams of Alyx always faces a conundrum when designing Spring. He’s the kind of guy who likes leather, denim, or insulating wool; fabrics that carry a bit of weight and heft to them, not to mention a bit of drama. I mean, when was the last time you saw linen play to the back of the room, beautiful though it is? It just doesn’t lend itself to the kind of sculpting and shaping that suggests dark urbanity, which is essentially Alyx’s stock in trade.
So this was Williams’s thinking: Take the idea of lightness and transparency—the latter emerging as a big story for next Spring—and work it his way. That meant creating dresses and skirts in a criss-cross net of washed and knitted bands, such as a long-top short dress with trailing ribbon cuffs and hem, or a long tubular skirt worn with an abbreviated and rather nifty black double-breasted blazer. The resulting looks were studies in contrast—hard yet soft, sexy yet athletic, the suggestion of the body without a big reveal—which is, let’s face it, the challenge of much of the diaphanous clothing that has breezed by these last few weeks.
And herein lies the appeal of Alyx. Williams has a sure eye for clothes that a carry a certain underground vibe to them, but he doesn’t allow them to be become completely engulfed by it. It’s a label that can offer the perfect black leather biker or denim jacket, tricked up with a few fetish-y metal details—rings piercing the fabric, say—as much as it can a series of gorgeous ruche-front slip dresses in a shade of red that fairly reverberated. Perhaps the tricky balancing act that Williams pulled off is best examined from the ground up. His mules and boots, in yet more of that vivid red or gleaming silver, underscored perfectly the appeal of his label; pretty but tough, tough but pretty. In today’s world, the coolest looking girls want to have both.
