This summer, Vivienne and Andreas went to visit his brother’s farm in the Tyrol. There, they keep cows, one of whom is named Donatella. “But I don’t think it’s necessarily after Donatella Versace,” added Kronthaler, when pressed. He also added that another cow is named Vivienne (definitely after Westwood, who helped deliver her), while another is named Naomi, and yet another is named Rihanna, “probably because they play music in the cowshed—they milk more when they are relaxed—and Rihanna was playing when she was born.”
If this collection was a cheese, it would be soft, hard, sweet, and tart all at the same time: It was a many-splendored, multi-gendered thing. There was the usual pentimento of props—plastic-wrapped vizier’s hats, wearable frames, and a huge green fatberg of some sort near the end. The collection was shown around a backdrop of boys with glittered lips and painted faces wrapped in duvets, there because Kronthaler thought that the building’s backdrop was unsympathetic. One soft pink dress (also near the end) worn with a safety helmet was so complex in its mollusk patination of indentation and twist at the arm and chest, yet so simple in its powerfully undone sexiness. Sex, rather frenzied, loomed large here. Rural idylls populated by nymphs and livestock taken from Bruegel and Boucher were sometimes overlaid with a priapic pattern Kronthaler had spotted in a piece of Spanish-wrought iron. Boys wore tight pants held up by marijuana-leaf buckles with only more printed Arcadian promise between them and the watching world. Girls wore retro porn-star earrings and disassembled dresses, dirndls, and suits over Asics pimped with embroidery and fringe. Of course, a guy wore a pair of very proper high heels. It was a chaos, which, in its variousness, you might be misrepresenting to call controlled. But who wants to be controlled?
