After nine seasons showing in New York, John Elliott said at this Paris showroom interlude that he plans to bring the full hoopla of a fashion show to the Paris capital in June. That’s an admirable ambition, yet the more time we spent talking and trawling his rails the more it became apparent that Elliott’s clothes are extremely hot on the hanger in a way that might be tricky to translate to the runway.
The theme of the collection was literal and personal: Elliott’s great-great-grandfather built himself a log cabin in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains that remains in the family to this day. Elliott had not visited it for 15 years until a recent return that blew him away. Elliott said, “The kind of life that you live out there is so vastly different than the speed at which I live in L.A. So that informed not only the choices in fabrication and process, but also the way I thought about putting the collection together.”
As well as a new sense of mindfulness, the cabin also proved the source of much of the decoration here. A lined multicolor jacquard, a really beautifully textured fabric used in Western shirts, was based on the pattern of a throw in one of the bedrooms. The bloom of white on indigo in the Japanese shibori dyed pieces in French terry (a great Americanism that sounds like an unrealized Damon Runyon character) was taken from the pattern burned by a candle on a tablecloth during an electricity blackout on his second night in the wilderness. Shorts came handsomely patterned after the rainbow glisten of the steelhead trout fishable nearby.
The parallels continued in the melted lava abstraction of the pattern on some fleeces and the jostling butterflies on camp collar shirts. More deeply diverting were the wonderfully rich plays of texture and pattern achieved by overdyeing, waxing, and even burning on some denim pieces, the great crispy feel and color fade on some loose nylon pants, and the hyper-abstract overdyed camouflage effects on jersey pants, sweats, and cotton T-shirts. These were clothes you wanted to spend a long sojourn on your porch appreciating; to watch them march past in a near instant would have been something of a shame. Still, however you get to glimpse them—or even better wear them—Elliott’s garments seem pretty special: both forward-facing and backwoods-beautiful.
