This resort season, many designers are preparing for long-awaited summer breaks with clothes as light and bright as their intended destinations. (After a year at home, it’s cheering to see clothes that you might wear to an actual, you know, resort.) Despite the imagined travels of Eudon Choi’s collections over the past year—whisking his customer away to places as far-flung and exotic as the Swiss Alps, the Amalfi Coast, and Bhutan—this time around he made an unexpected pivot toward something more rooted in the earth.
The dusty khakis, sun-scorched yellows, and slate grays this season speak to Choi’s primary inspiration, which was not a destination but an artist: Specifically Ana Mendieta, the Cuban American performance artist whose distinctive work throughout the 1970s fused body art with land art. Mendieta’s “earth-body” interventions—which saw her subsume herself in nature by leaving ritualistic traces of her body’s topography in snow, mud, or stones—were Choi’s starting point. “Nature was the keyword this season,” he said. It emerged in a literal sense through the wide range of organic wools and cottons; traceable, ethically sourced cashmeres; and natural fibers he chose to use. “It’s baby steps,” said Choi. “I was hesitant to talk about it as I’m not claiming to be fully sustainable, of course; we’re just trying to be more conscious with our fabric choices.”
Choi’s inspiration may be a little more cerebral than the flights of fancy of his past few seasons, but as usual, it translated into clothes that balance practicality with directional flair. Traces of his irrepressible wanderlust spring up in the collection’s prints, which feature splashes of hibiscus pink and buttercup florals. A series of slinky, formfitting knit dresses with fringed skirts have a palpably luxurious weight to them, while tops and dresses cut from thick cottons feature Choi’s signature ruching and fabric strings that allow the wearer to switch up from oversized to artfully cinched with a gentle tug. Particularly gorgeous are the trench coats and bags featuring panels of guipure lace stitched to emulate crochet. It’s Choi’s ability to find the sweet spot between disparate elements that impresses, even as he opens a new, more considered chapter for his brand.
