At 18, heeding the siren call of New York City, Raul Solis packed his bags and moved from the West Coast. His coming of age coincided with the rise of the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Rapture, who played at small venues to beer-fueled crowds at the time: the scene documented in Meet Me in the Bathroom, essentially. For spring, Solis indulged in what he called “twisted nostalgia” by referencing the early 2000s and its early ’60s teddy-boy roots in a collection that was indie—without the sleaze—both in aesthetics and origin.
It’s no small feat to keep a self-owned business afloat. Elements of the collection—the melted Mickey Mouse figures, a pair of pants made from old American flags—speak to the world we’re living in today, one where the dream coexists with nightmares. The crystal blood drops on slim-cut pants and jackets reference the struggle but not in a macabre way—they’re applied in an orderly fashion, and they twinkle.
The crystal drops are a bridge to the bleeding hearts of Solis’s last collection, shown in October. Similarly the final dress—with its stuffed, moldable attachments—looks like a nod to the body-baring silhouettes of the last show. As such, it was an outlier here and a distraction from the main mood of the new offering, which leaned toward a certain brand of underground, nonconformist cool.
After the drama of putting on a show, Solis said he wanted to focus on relatable, sellable clothes. So he cut a striped turtleneck to expose just the right slice of midriff and accessorized a pair of low-cut rocker pants with an extra-big belt buckle and a trailing skinny scarf. A mini kilt looked anything but uniform, and wide-cut jeans were made to rave. All of these pieces conveyed a narrative without being tricky.
Close inspection revealed many wonderful details, like shirts with red laces passing through embroidered grommets (referencing the spine or corset lacing), pants and tops with hidden zips that can be worn in unexpected ways, and detachable tulle-lined bows on button-downs that let the wearer determine the tempo, as it were, of their look. When Solis stuck with the score, this collection made sweet music.
