Now over to Vienna, where Petar Petrov has been shooting his collection in the open air. “It was nice to get a feeling of lightness. You know, spring is the season I like most, because it has this freshness and you have more light, people are positive, everyone feels like it’s a new beginning,” he said. So herewith, a Petrov street scene with striding women—figuratively liberated from three seasons of confinement within the walls of a studio or domestic setting.
Petrov’s followers are always after his practicality, precision, and cool, grown-up air of not having tried too hard. There’s something of the attitude of the ’90s behind his judgments about tailoring and dresses—a touch of Helmut Lang in his trouser cuts; a minimalist discipline—and this season’s cleaned-up memory of the grunge years clicks with his constituency. “For me, it’s most important that we should make real clothes that are comfortable for real people. I don’t like costume clothes,” said Petrov on a Zoom session. His touchstone is designing for women who want to “feel like you didn’t talk so much about what you’re wearing—you know, you just put it on and that’s it.”
It’s a broad-ranging lifestyle-tuned collection, so here follows a selection for cherry-pickers. Double-denim shirts and wide-leg jeans (Japanese-sourced for authenticity; no synthetic stretch fibers.) Louche-yet-crisp pant suits with oversized jackets and knife-pressed boot-cut trousers. And dresses that twist conventions in various nuanced ways. One: a shirt dress with a vaguely bandanna print on it, which is subtly fitted in front and breezes out at the back when walking. Two: a twist on body-conscious dressing achieved through a diagonally-striped knitted dress, which has another balloon-creating semi-sheer slip beneath. Three: a black cotton cap-sleeved dress with an almost monastic A-line volume.
Before pressing ‘leave’ on our Zoom conversation, Petrov mentioned that he was about to leave for Paris to talk about the possibility of having a physical show there in March. On the other hand, it might be just as interesting for some people to make their way to Austria to see what Petrov is doing there. Didn’t we all say that localism was an important facet of sustainability? Petar Petrov’s audience would surely be behind that.
