The internet has recently become fascinated with an AI image generator called Dall-E mini. The web application takes text input and translates it into a spooky, impressionist rendering of whatever your mind can dream up. It’s a tool Area’s Piotrek Panszczyk could do wonders with, at least if his pre-fall collection is any measure. Here, in images by Collier Schorr styled by Katie Burnett, he delivers Dua Lipa meets Marie Curie in the Garden of Eden, Hubert de Givenchy by way of harajuku flowers, and Edwige Bellmore via Emma Corrin, among other conflicting and contrasting moods.
Flora and fauna were Panszczyk’s most obvious starting point, taking hot pink duchesse satin and creating static floral poufs that could be sized up or down to create a crop top and mini skirt or an entrancing dress. Flowers also appear as spiked crystal tops and pasties, as sunglasses, as earrings, and as crystal pants that wind up the legs. Since Area’s last collection, its showgirl potential has become more fully realized; these experiments in fluttering crystal seem destined for Beyoncé, Olivia Rodrigo, Precious Lee, or any of the other larger-than-life women that swear by the brand’s devilishly saccharine clothes.
Careful to not give it all away in a pre-collection, Panszczyk has balanced it out with sharpened tailoring in black, white, and brown houndstooth boasting crystal trim, as well as an extended, Alaïa-esque section of leopard print pouf skirts and teensy bustiers. You could chasen him for borrowing so readily from other designer’s oeuvres if it was exactly how so many others of his generation work without ever acknowledging the reference or working to modify it to a current woman’s fixations.
The disparate harmony of a blazers-to-pasties collection is justified by the Area books. According to Panszczyk and his co-founder Beckett Fogg, the customer wants a crystal-strewn tee as much as she wants a Vegas-worthy headpiece. Not much in between. For seasons, Area has been reckoning with these two poles, daily use versus drama, but it seems the brand is on its way to a single more unified vision of something “dainty, natural, sultry, and thorny.” Per Panszczyk, “sexiness is just a byproduct of wearing Area.” A woman’s confidence fills out these clothes and they are provocative not just in the physical sense but in the mental one: Do you have what it takes?
