Growing up often goes like this: Your brain expands tenfold, and suddenly you’re angry all the time. Maybe you get a severe haircut. Maybe you lean into some eccentricity in your personal style. For the first few years of Babyghost, designers Joshua Hupper and Qiaoran Huang designed clothes for those moments in your life, when you wanted to be your baddest and weirdest self. But for Spring 2020, they grew and mellowed out. Now in their tenth year, the duo has learned how to make clothing that sells, but in the process, they may have lost a little bit of the spark that made their first few years so exciting, fearless, and freaky.
Hupper called this collection “our ‘first job’ collection,” referring to the fact that this was the first time they really felt like this was a job, not a side project, in part due to the line’s commercial success. These were buyer-driven “work clothes” for gainfully employed current and former club kids. That isn’t to say they were your typical 9-to-5 pieces. Inspired by Anne Desclos’s Story of O, Naomi Watts’s character in Funny Games, and the first Nine Inch Nails EP, Hupper and Huang worked in a few subtle nods to bondage. Two “wedding dresses” made the cheeky point that marriage is a form of bondage in its own way, and there was a neon blue Chinese wedding certificate printed on a shirtdress, styled with a cozy, tiger-print cardigan.
If you separate those references from the collection itself, these were relatively easy, straightforward clothes you could wear to work or to a rave. The motorcycle jackets, puffers, creamy knits, and technical dresses felt like clothes meant to be lived in, with less experimentation than Babyghost’s past collections. Wearability shouldn’t be discounted here, but the changes amounted to a less stimulating collection on the whole. Babyghost has matured with time, but Hupper and Huang should try to find more of a middle ground, with an eye to their past informing their present.
