Give this lede a minute to get through: For Spring, Kiko Kostadinov looked to a piece by German artist Martin Kippenberger called The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika. Kippenberger took one of the posthumously published book’s ideas, communal job interviews, and crafted it into an installation. Of the piece, the artist said, “[It’s] a circus in town . . . outside the circus tent, in my imagination, there would be tables and chairs set up for job interviews.” Fascinated by this premise, Kostadinov then decided to place the whole notion in an extrapolated fictional town set on the Ganges river in India. In fashion layman’s terms, let’s put it this way: Where Moschino’s Los Angeles big top from just a few days ago was all surface sugar, Kostadinov’s act was swayingly cerebral. It was a long shot, but it mostly cohered and convinced.
In regards to the employment element, Kostadinov said backstage that these men were at different stages of their professional lives. A striped short-sleeved button-down with geometric prints and papery jacquard pants may have represented someone on the more junior side of things; plaid blazers near show’s end seemed to suggest someone higher up the ladder.
But all the same, this was a far cry from possible corporate garb, and more in line with a neo-bohemian complex of, call it, legalized-weedwear marries athletic-weekendwear (a collaboration with Asics continued). Fisherman jackets, twisted and cropped and wrapped trousers, and curving-seamed jumpers all registered. It would be hard to see these clothes as relatable in any way to job-interview styling, but, conversely, they did their job, in their rightly weird ways, by making us think about just how out-there some people are willing to think. Conclusion: So long as the backbone is behind that thinking and it’s not all just hot air, that’s a good thing.
