For spring, Phillip Lim continued to evolve the off-duty uniform for everyday wardrobing, starting by looking at denim as a textile rather than just a category.
“We’re wanting to really push the fun more — push the denim, the spaces and the categories you’d wear denim with the softness, colors, vibrancy,” he explained during an appointment in his Great Jones Street store, adding his resort collection’s ‘90s mentality also came into the fold. “Our version of grunge — slightly, but not so literally. It’s really the amalgamation of the ‘90s and 2000s, now — but also, what does New York mean to us right now.”
Lim successfully recontextualized denim with his signature feminine, romantic utility spin. Acid-washed pineapple- and periwinkle-hued and all-white denim dressing came in the form of a combination lace slip dress; a tie-front trapeze tank with mid-length half-circle skirt; sweatpant-style pants with updated trucker jackets; paperbag-waist pants and Muay Thai boxer shorts; slouchy utility jackets, and padded pillow slides.
His palette expanded into other optimistic, elegant but youthful hues such as bright blue — striped crochet knits that dissolved into fringe — baby yellow, peach and green, à la spray-painted “watermelon” striped little pop camp shirts, while prints and waved design details were pulled from gestural Art Nouveau prints. For instance, the designer’s pleated dresses with fan collar and corset panel with 100 percent recycled fabric asymmetric patching or a boxy utility shirt with waved lace inserts.
From relaxed suiting — an unconstructed linen blazer that fits like a cardigan with ‘40s-style pants — and novelty knitwear to new prism totes (offered in three sizes in mesh, canvas and colorful strips of repurposed archive leather), Lim’s fashions were ones to function in fashionably.
Case in point? His new mesh skeleton shopper — or market bag, which the designer had been wear testing. “It holds, literally, bikinis to beer. You can do anything with it, even in the rain — it’s just indestructible.” What more could one need come summertime?
