Fashion-wise, Newton’s Third Law no longer applies: The long-evolved physics of cyclical collections, wholesale retail, and consumer desire has been rudely upended by larger forces of the universe. Which leaves a designer as thoughtful and prescient as Astrid Andersen entirely reconsidering her actions. As she explained down the phone from Copenhagen: “The starting point for the collection was to ask, ‘Should you even do one?’ You know, is it really relevant right now? Is the market there? What’s happening? That was such a different starting point in itself, that the process came from that. So there was a certain level of escapism in it; it’s definitely not meant for just sitting at home being quiet.”
Andersen said she wanted to return in some respects to her origins, which she did in terms of both silhouette and sumptuousness. However her earliest basketball/fur/lace equation was succeeded by more various elements, less rigidly applied. Shot in the domed dining space of chef Rasmus Munk’s technologically decadent restaurant Alchemist, Andersen’s collection blends Aloha shirts, mesh baseball shirts, zebra-stripe jacquard, check flannel, one regally two-toned fur piece, and garment dyed jersey and denim.
In a few looks, she tellingly upended her usual mania for symmetry’s harmony by splicing print with a collegiate shirt or cutting a shades-of-gray check garment into a shirt-gown hybrid. “I love when things match up, usually. This was the first time for me to really try and break that up. And so this was supposed to look more, not random, but spontaneous. You know, not everything is supposed to look correct.” What does correct even mean, anyway? Andersen’s shifted juxtapositions reflected a moment in which the rules of desire are in such flux that the only law worth observing is your own intuition.
