Be careful what you wish for. In her preprepared press release, Astrid Andersen said she had dropped the runway show format this season because she wanted to do something a little bit different—to both challenge herself and her audience. Thus the idea was to present a live lookbook shoot, gonzo-style, and allow her invitees a four-hour window to watch it happen. The shoot was due to open at 11:30 a.m., but nope, doors shut. I played the Vogue Runway card (the best) and oozed in as the first model was asking whether he could wear his grimy yellow socks on set. Andersen, dashing about in a baseball djellaba and looking totally un-chilled, confessed, “Nobody knows what’s going on!”
After a deep breath, a little moment, she added: “The idea is that the guests look at the research upstairs and then come down and watch the shoot, where we have worked to create this fantasy set. As soon as these boys are dressed, I hope you will see that the concept is a sort of ’60s, ’70s space dreaming, that summer vacation vibe, with something that felt artificial and retro, like that UFO on set alongside that . . .”
“Blatantly fake crocodile?”
“Ha! Yeah! This season, we really focused on developing a smaller catwalk collection and developing our core pieces, to really get the tracksuit nailed down.” Those catwalk looks were led by wide-leg silver tracksuits with an embossed crocodile relief. Andersen said she had discovered albino crocodiles actually exist, and had become fixated by their twisted beauty. “It’s nature, but it looks artificial and so surreal.”
By now, the model had been guided to remove the socks and Andersen’s stylist, the excellent but misguidedly Liverpool-supporting Elgar Johnson, was intently giving commands as a piece of aluminum foil was pressed into his face. Andersen’s staff were wanly urging photographers to get out of the way of the 360-degree live-feed camera (of course, there was a live feed). The photographers breezily riposted that you can’t ever get out of the way of such a stupid camera—and that they were going to take their photographs, whatever, okay?
Meanwhile, Andersen showed off her metallic bouclé tops with raw necklines and her Cardin-inspired armless jackets featuring de-centered zippers, plus taped tracksuits fabricated in a mix of raw Thai silk and high-shine orange nylon. It was a meld of the apparently artificial aligned with the apparently natural. They looked good. Commercial-rack-wise, there were a series of sweats, some knit polos I had no idea Andersen does, plus tees featuring the unsettling scarlet eye of Andersen’s albino croc.
As I headed out for the next thing, Andersen observed: “Hopefully, once it’s all done, the shoot will contain something similar, something a bit sinister.” Then, she swiveled back to her chaos in progress and sighed. Be careful what you wish for. Strong collection, though.
