“That which weighs heavy on the mind / Anchor our actions to the world.” So ran the first two lines of the third act of poet Wilson Oryema’s text to accompany the film dropped with this A-Cold-Wall collection. Whereas last season Samuel Ross referred to the changes that have unfolded during 300,000 years of history, for this collection he had more than enough material by sticking with the last seven months.
Weighing on Ross’s mind as evidenced by the action in this video was the lockdown (Act I), emergence from it (Act II), and our progress to an uncharted future (Act III). Also moving Ross’s dial was the shifting gravity of social uprising. This was Ross’s second runway-season collection in partnership with Stefano Martinetto’s Italian production powerhouse Tomorrow Ltd. With the menswear calendar merged with the women’s—and with Stella Jean having stepped off it as a challenge to the system here about its lack of inclusion—this left Ross as the only established Black designer on the Milan schedule. Black Lives Matter, and that extra Italian factor are all weighty contextual reefs through which to steer his young business, but Ross, with great concentration, is cutting through
During a Zoom from London (he’s still based there, even if the garments are made and shown in Italy), Ross said: “I’ve definitely had to augment my direction as a form of response […] the reality is that we are going to have to stay in our personal spaces for a long time, but still aspire to a feeling of professionalism.” This translated into pieces in which you could discern the fossilized silhouette of 20th-century suiting, proto-Prada-ish, but expressed in technically-spliced knit and jersey. Around these were layered stratae of garments, including ergonomic bobbly gilet/harnesses, collarless shirting, and ruched bombers. Referring to his shapes Ross cited Bauhaus, Dada, and Albers, adding that the graphics spoke to Niemeyer—classic modernist grist to the fashion designer mill—and emphasized asymmetry and those ergonomic curves as key parts of the visual language he is building. Accenting that were some lilting and again layered gradations of tone and patina in garment and/or tie-dyed denim and jersey pieces. Also present were more easily readable punctuations of house graphics, which makes sense when you are trying to cultivate a flourishing commercial business from a flourishing conceptual label in the grip of 2020.
Of this process Ross said: “I am learning fast!” Two well-performing collaborations (with Converse and Retrosuperfuture), plus a first-ever pre-spring collection that more than doubled projected sales, said Ross, suggest that: “We are making huge strides from diligently working and learning what it takes to survive and move forward confidently in the industry.”
Moving forward in the system is progress even if the system is flawed. As Ross said: “If we’re not happy with the tropes that have been applied to people of color for the last 200 years, and I’m not happy with them, in terms of performance, in terms of bard, in terms of concubine, then we need to invert and implode our level of engagements with those discourses. There is more power in the hands of Black people than we think.” The revolutionary is often tricky to articulate because language has not yet caught up with the idea: Both in clothes and words Ross is laying out a position that is both increasingly meaningful and urgent.
