In November, Alexander Wang said he was skipping out on fashion shows in 2020 in favor of a 15th anniversary blowout. The choice was unfortunately prophetic; with COVID-19 locking down much of America, Wang never had the chance to have a party, a shopping event, not even a trip on the party bus around Manhattan. But also prophetically, he asked Steven Klein to photograph his fall 2020 collection on a cast of his favorite models—Gigi Hadid to Binx Walton—in December. That lookbook is debuting today, reframing Wang’s collection as a see-now-buy-now experience.
The clothes that make up the collection are oddly prescient too—or maybe not. Glamleisure is par for the course of any Wang garment, and many of the themes he started to work on in seasons past resurfaced here. T-shirts and sweatshirts are ruched into couch-worthy corsetry while denim is used both for tailoring and for slouchy shorts. On a phone call prior to the collection’s release, Wang stressed the immediacy of his offering, clothing that can instantly connect to his shopper and weave into her life seamlessly.
That’s smart business, but what about smart design? It’s the closing looks of this collection that push Wang’s aesthetic further, a set of dramatically off-kilter minidresses in neoprene and velvet with high shoulders jutting up or out, frantically popped collars, and dangerously asymmetric hems. They are the rare Wang Squad garm that prizes silhouette apart from sex appeal—an interesting new path for the designer to experiment with for his next 15 years in business.
