Maryam Nassir Zadeh was one of several designers who didn’t have a show at New York Fashion Week this season; others included Ralph Lauren, Phillip Lim, and Lou Dallas. The break proved refreshing for Zadeh. The stress and expense of planning a show was likely a factor, but it was mostly a personal choice: A dear friend was getting married in Africa, and she couldn’t fathom not being there. “For certain people in your life, these are the moments you can’t miss,” Zadeh said.
That her response—sensitive, human—registered as a surprise says a lot about the rigid structure of the fashion calendar. For most of us, the shows are a fixed, unyielding constant in our lives: We plan everything around them, and the general feeling is that attending a wedding, getting sick, or having a personal problem is simply not an option. But that may be fading as designers like Zadeh question the two-shows-per-year diktat and rethink how they present their collections. Is the runway the “best way”? Why not mix it up from time to time?
Zadeh was still a little nervous about how her fans, editors, and buyers would react, but was so happy with the collection that it outweighed her concerns. “It sort of makes me wish people could see it in a show!” she said with a laugh. The irony, of course, is that the clothes turned out this way because she knew they wouldn’t have to parade down a catwalk. She designed these clothes in the context of how women will wear them, not how they’ll appear in runway photos.
That was one of the bigger takeaways here: that Zadeh wanted to get back to the clothes, with none of the pressure of making things that “live up to” the runway (i.e. overcomplicated, over-styled stuff that often doesn’t even get produced). She looked to some of her early collections, which leaned quite minimal, for inspiration, alighting on menswear tailoring and twisted bourgeois items like pleated miniskirts and leather-trimmed sweaters. She also brought back a few of her favorite pieces, like a midiskirt and a zip-up bomber jacket, and she’s getting back into reworked denim again, too. On the phone from Africa, she noted that, coincidentally, the jeans patched with multicolored circles had a bit of an African feeling to them, ditto the beaded jewelry, leather cord belts, and tasseled bags.
Zadeh’s focused, streamlined approach to this collection made it memorable in a different way than the tinsel dresses and mashed-up prints of seasons’ past, and felt more in line with her own style. That’s how the MNZ line began, after all: an extension of her highly specific, often ahead-of-the-trends taste. Lately, she’s been feeling for items with longevity, usually in the form of vintage tailoring or quite classic pieces, like button-downs and midiskirts. She isn’t the only designer reviving those codes, but for her audience, it will be more of a pivot. Here, those items were still styled in the characteristically quirky, MNZ-ish way: with socks and sandals, blouses single-buttoned over no bra, jeans scrunched into knee-high boots. If some of the details are difficult to make out in these artful, intentionally-blurred photos by Sharna Osborne, it only emphasizes that these aren’t difficult clothes you need to zoom in on and analyze. Sometimes it’s the simplest stuff that yields the most creative and covetable results.
