Designers, editors, and buyers were complaining about the fashion calendar long before the pandemic upended our industry. As the pace of fashion—and the world—sped up, the concept of seeing clothes six months before they’d be available felt incongruous. Now, we aren’t confident about what will happen next week, let alone a full season into the future. Still, Vogue Runway covered two hundred resort 2021 collections that attempted to do just that. There were some genuinely thoughtful ideas and flashes of optimism, but it was hard to ignore the irony of applying the “old model” to our very new, uncertain world.
Mara Hoffman wasn’t just reluctant to predict what our lives might look like in a few months. She also had tons of clothes that either never made it to stores or spent little time on the shelves; figuring out what to do with them felt more pressing than producing a whole new collection. “The concept of making more things to alleviate us from what we already have…. That’s what got us here in the first place,” she explained, referring to fashion’s problems of excess and waste. Instead, Hoffman and her friend Rachael Wang took stock of her current inventory, then re-styled and re-contextualized it to create a look book that reflects our current moment. In lieu of making a grandiose statement about “what’s next,” it captures the uncertainty and the “messiness,” as Hoffman put it, of right now.
That came through first in the collaged format of the images. Hoffman photographed models in her upstate New York home and took snaps of her favorite books, houseplants, and the surrounding forests and mushrooms, then cut them all up and layered them together. The clothes themselves were also layered, and styled in a comfortable, casual, offhand way that mirrors how we put ourselves together at home. A rumpled striped linen suit from spring 2020 got a second chance, as did a black sculptural knit dress from fall 2020. Other looks mashed together seasons and years, with best-sellers next to items you may have missed (all made to Hoffman’s sustainability standards, mostly in natural fibers like Tencel, alpaca, and linen). One of the only brand-new items was also the most exciting: a fluffy ivory sweater knitted from wool sourced from a regenerative farm in California. It’s the first glimpse of an ongoing partnership with the Climate Beneficial program at Fibershed, a nonprofit that develops regenerative fiber systems and connects farmers with designers and manufacturers. (Hoffman isn’t the only designer getting into “regenerative ag”; Gucci recently announced it would invest in regenerative agriculture as part of an effort to offset its emissions.)
In addition to making a statement about waste and newness, this project is Hoffman’s first experiment in a “buy-now-wear-now” model. She will release these pieces over the course of the next few months and plans to do the same with her future collections. It’s a decision made for her customer, and her next goal is to offer similarly friendly prices. By trimming her brand’s wholesale accounts from a few hundred to just 10, she’s confident she can eliminate certain retail margins and align style and sustainability in an accessible way.
