Six seasons in and one very well-deserved ANDAM Prize later, Atlein’s Antonin Tron has taken stock of where he’s been—and where he’s at. Apologies for the use of a phrase that’s a throwback to the head-trip hippie 1970s, but it’s kind of appropriate here; like many designers, Tron is both engaging with the reality of working as a young independent designer in an industry that’s being put through the ringer right now, and also his own mental and emotional wanderlust, that desire to be someplace else where you can breathe and think a little bit easier and deeper. In Tron’s case, it might have been the trip he made this past summer to Indonesia to surf (he’s serious about his commitment to getting on his board), but for Spring, he was thinking about the utopian idylls depicted in the work of French animator René Laloux, specifically his 1973 movie Fantastic Planet.
Articulating a wide-eyed wonder for the world, for the beauty and fragility of nature—not to mention the West Coast festival-going lifestyle that celebrates it—has become a recurring theme for Spring. And it was an interesting—and ultimately fruitful—line of thinking for Tron to take, because for all the dreaminess, he allied it to his deep-rooted pragmatism. He can live in his head all he likes, but there’s an absolute corporeality to his clothes, something strongly evident in this terrific collection. This time around, it was in the form of his sharp yet youthful takes on the omnipresent pantsuit, worked here as short buckle-waisted bombers and utility jackets, both worn with lean yet fluid trousers, all in a vibrant deep red or homespun blue or pink florals, which had a naive charm to them.
Elsewhere, Tron recalibrated where he first started—a sure hand with sinuously draped fabric—with bicolored dresses or fluttery layerings of athletic tanks under short bias slips, ethereal and grounded at the same time. Occasionally, some of his models would carry tiny bags with long, skinny straps. You could easily mistake them for bikinis—as if these young women had just shaken the water off of themselves and then gotten dressed. It was an alluring image: the suggestion of a wonderful life elsewhere, but still very much present in the here and now.
