Alix Higgins was thinking about earthquakes and an animal feeling. The visceral, elemental mood of Lars Von Trier films (Dogville, Antichrist) and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” resonated with something pent-up in him after spending many meetings discussing the business end of his emerging label. “I was feeling this sense of creative frustration and wanting to really shake the world with my work,” he said. “Kind of like feeding a creative beast.”
In this, his second-ever runway show, he didn’t get bogged down, so to speak, in overt links to muddy, earthy motifs —though models padded barefoot in black feet, that appeared peat-smeared. A scan of a vintage wolf-fur he had when he was working in Paris under Marine Serre was the most literal. Made into prints on halter-tops and skirts in his signature stretch-fabric and transferred onto cotton trenches; his “fur coat” was part of what he called a “refined wildness.” His signature stretched horizon prints returned, and haphazard words on his gender-neutral pieces, some plucked with humor from Internet-and queer-lexicons (“bottom” being also Shakespearean), others more gently poetic, though quietly evolved in monochrome and applied to pleating.
Higgins is someone who creates instinctually, not by sketching and creating moodboards. This was how he formed the newness of upcycled polo shirts, hand-manipulated into sculptural evening tops, and drama-filled caped evening gowns that tap the ease of t-shirt. This gives a delicacy to his work, and a lightness of form with subtle meanings. Those clean shapes and subtlety though, come naturally to him— it would be exciting to see what would happen if he let the animal instinct properly loose on them.
