Not so long ago, the climate at Iceberg was stone-cold dead. Now, that’s changed: Since James Long began emitting his vision for the brand, Iceberg’s temperature has been rising at an alarming rate.
This afternoon’s show was packed to the aisles with Iceberg-clad acolytes keen to be frozen for posterity by street style lensers. It was a bit of a circus, but much more fun than the sad old days.
Long’s collection was shot through with the broken-check pattern that also graced his carpet, a fractured update of last season’s intact check. There was some very impressive blended outerwear—bombers and overcoats for men and women—in which the wool was grafted onto branded Iceberg-logo strata. The near-the-beginning, silky blue jacket and jumpsuit for women featuring the carpet pattern as jacquard had both sophistication and pep. That opening blue period segued to white as a gesture towards this season’s licensed characters, whose portraits were etched in paneled knitwear: Snow White, The Evil Queen, and Dopey. Then, via black, came a shift to pupil-dilating pink, which Long said was a nod to Barbara Cartland. The sky-high curl that looped aloft many of the female models’ heads looked hugely Suzy Menkes. Through all of these asides, a chopped salad of diverse garments featuring the same underlying pattern kept coming—in shiny PVC, red on black, as a bomber, a pant, a pair of boots that came with shin guards, as pleated pink kilts with buckle-heavy overlayings, as the pattern on fanny packs, and as more, more, more.
Long said afterward: “I was looking at PJ Harvey, Siouxsie Sioux, Tori Amos, Karen O . . . . I was trying to mix the punk with the sports, which is what I always do.” And so very well, too.
