“It’s kinda Dutch merchants traveling to Japanese shores—something like that!” Natalia Alaverdian’s designs for All Wonderful Adventures Kindle Enthusiasm (Mode) are way too abstractedly sincere to reduce to a figurative elevator pitch, but it was kind of her to try. What she was trying to transmit was her enduring Dutch-master-Japanese-costume poles of inspiration, over which Alaverdian layers a practice and aesthetic that is all of her own (and often inspiring to others).
This season, in addition to her ongoing laser-cut disc garments—1970s curtains-ish—she applied the same sliced geometric thinking to pieces, sometimes layered, in semi-detached rectangles. “They kind of remind me of airline-timetable boards, with the flight destinations flipping up and down,” she wistfully observed from London.
Regular highlight destinations in the A.W.A.K.E customer’s seasonal shop revisited here included shirred asymmetric shirting, backless tailoring, and side-split trousers. Accessories-wise she evolved the brand’s deep dive into the gloopy-looking oversized-weave or folded leather bags that have proven so influential and finally showed her volumized sneaker sole with the transparent upper she’d long planned to pair it with. These sneakers were worn with semi-split adapted hakama pants for an effect that Alaverdian, now deep into her mood-board metaphors, said “is sort of Natalia Imbruglia meets Prodigy.”
Other departures included Dada-esque cutlery jewelry, cutout bodies, detachable woven sleeves designed to be worn strapped loosely to sleeveless shirting, and a cool woven mule on a mid-height heel. Alaverdian throws great shapes.
