Despite—or perhaps because of—the constraints of a fresh lockdown at home in Australia, Christopher Esber and his team made a conscious decision to be optimistic and not hold back.
“There was less trial and error,” he allowed in a Zoom interview, adding that he really missed the magical aspect of being with his team in the atelier. Lots of decisions needed to happen early in the process, he said, because there was no luxury of changing course midstream. The result was a spring collection that looked as polished and coherent as any of his outings in recent memory.
Esber started with the idea of a dusty summer and washed-out shades like chalky orange, sage, turmeric, saffron, and clay for oversized tailored pieces in cotton linen that he described as having a “mottled, crunchy” texture, paired here with sun-faded neon tanks. Jackets or tops extrapolated from men’s holiday shirts might have a collar in shirred-effect crochet for texture or deep side slits and trailing ties to make it explicitly feminine. He also played around with leather, paneling it together with cotton and linen on suiting with lace accents. Experiments with crochet—worked into bead-studded ribbing on sheaths and jackets, revisited in ribbon yarn, or presented as open knit at the midriff—underscored the time-intensive, fragile nature of craft. Those brought appealing texture to the lineup, and the collection was stronger for it.
Works by the neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, and his revisitation of The Odyssey in particular, were a touchpoint for pieces draped, coiled, and underpinned to appear like “a twisted tornado around the body.” True to form, Esber explored the possibilities of negative space with an assist from chains, coiled metal, and hardware resembling a leather buckle or by suspending an amethyst in resin inside a cutout on a jersey dress to underscore tension. “It’s like a specimen from a reading room, but I’m giving it space to breathe,” he offered.
Esber also has been trying his hand at fashion jewelry of late and not just on clothes. This season he’s rocking out with quartz-studded boots. Elsewhere, half-hoop earrings in gold and red jasper or tigereye can be worn either classically or back to front.
