As a stylist, Karl Templer has long been extremely successful. As a designer, here at Ports 1961, he had until today pumped out a series of fine, super-bourgeois collections that were artfully fashioned and deeply thought through, but not necessarily the stuff of dreams. This morning, though, he shifted in a new direction that seemed like a fiery and fresh ignition.
Templer said he had been influenced by the idea of a “post-phone” sensibility: lovers of clothes who were framing their wearables for the signature piece rather than the full look. This starting point tilted him to a younger place that was still rooted in his deep knowledge of the codes of clothes. Graffiti-printed dresses and reliefed knitwear, deconstructed biker dresses and shirts, python accented pleats, T-shirt dresses, and double-layered perforated leather skirts and dresses were a few of the subjects of his refreshed brush. On the podium there were grommet-soled, stacked boots that in turn spoke to his gleaming hardware language for the brand—not exactly new, but specifically articulated.
It all added up to a Ports collection you could see activating the acquisitional energies of a demographic it has not previously stimulated. This was a punch-in-the-guts good collection that surprisingly and efficiently promoted Ports into a new league of relevance. Fashion is crying out for new ideas, and here we saw some. Even better, they were good.
