The slo-mo freak-out of the first weeks of the pandemic—we all remember how that felt. In Vienna, confined to quarters, Petar Petrov decided there was only one way to stop agonizing over what forthcoming life would be like, and what women would want to wear in the unpredictable future. “I decided I needed to stop watching the news.” he says. “And then, having a much longer time to do things, without all the rushing from one thing to the next, the traveling we had to do before—it’s actually been a nice process.”
Luckily for him, Petrov always works from home. His studio is in his spacious, high-up Viennese apartment, so all the wherewithal was there to start draping and tailoring his resort collection, just across the hall. “I decided I never want to touch an artificial fiber again. That things should never be for just one wear; that they have to be comfortable, but more interesting as well. A wardrobe that makes you feel easy in your skin.”
The results of that period of calm analysis—“thinking about the different social life we’ll be in”—turned into the best collection he’s yet arrived at, an intuitive segue into oversized jackets over fluid boot-cut trousers, traily-sleeved blouses, and clever developments of an elegantly minimal long dress that Petrov first devised for his fall runway show. The original dress-shape, with its voluminous sleeves, is repeated for resort —perfect, perhaps, for when or if domestic dinners are a thing again. But he also cut off the shape to form tunic-length blouses, one white, one black. Hence: an everyday solution for the top-half appearance of togetherness that, for the moment, qualifies as our professional lives on Zoom calls.
For all the clothes that are out there, comfort, ingenuity and sophistication rarely go hand in hand. Petar Petrov has that knack. Strangely, in these grim times, his focus has been stronger than ever before.
