“Here in Austria, everyone’s been socializing with friends on our balconies and in gardens—the whole summer was outdoors,” says Petar Petrov, from his studio apartment in Vienna. “Now, everyone we know has been buying infra-red heaters, trying to keep it going as long as possible—I mean, it’s a little bit difficult with our winter! There are no events or big celebrations—nobody knows when that’s coming back. But women are having small dinners at each others’ places, much more often.”
Enter a whole new social purpose for fashion design to cluster around: the zone of need/desire that’s suddenly opened up between red-carpet gowns on the one hand, and depressingly domestic tracksuit-wearing on the other. Petrov’s projection into next summer is pitched precisely there—at chicly-cool wrapped dresses and louchely-cut tailoring cleverly nuanced for the ways of living and
working that women are trying to adapt to, world over. “What we’re working on is extreme simplicity, in a way. The opposite of loading on details. Things that are challenging to make, but are comfortable to wear, and easy on the skin.”
It’s no stretch to imagine how appropriately these clothes will feel and perform. Take it back to perfecting the pattern of a boyish shirt—as opposed to a blouse—and fluid pants, to begin with. “It’s always difficult to cut a men’s shirt for a woman, so it has a classic man’s collar, but when you wear it, it’s not so oversized that it’s big around the waist.” A pair of trousers, lower-cut on the waist, wider in the leg, trick the eye by appearing to be jeans, but are actually dusty-blue suede. That’s the appeal of offhand stealth luxury that Petrov is reinventing—a quality that went missing from fashion for too many years. Bringing that mid-’90 concept into modern consciousness is his knack. It’s readable in the long bias-cut tank dress, a column with a slit in the side matched with a hip-length jacket, in the black leather spaghetti-strap camisole he’s slipped in, the drapey slouch of wide-leg cream over-the-foot length cargo pants with an oversize safari-pocketed jacket. For rising to the occasion of some sort of socially-distanced gathering (or a summer holiday—we can dream!) there’s the closely-considered asymmetry of halters and wrapped skirts in scarf prints, a deconstructed white cotton shirt dress with ribbon ties, and so on.
It’s a whole, relatable, wardrobe of options, really—a positively uplifting sight, while being absolutely down to earth about the situations that Petrov’s women of the world are finding themselves in. The neighborhood observations he took from his studio balcony during lockdown stretches far further than Vienna.
