Last year Lazoschmidl, which had been operating as a made-to-order brand, was picked up by Opening Ceremony. This positive reinforcement seems to have given Josef Lazo and Andreas Schmidl a boost of confidence. The pair, having recently signed with a Paris showroom, decided to take their show on the road, making their debut in the capital during the menswear season. The journey wasn’t without some bumps: the gilet jaunes protests rearranged the fashion schedule so that Lazoschmidl and Dior occupied the same slot. Not an enviable position, but not one that seems to have rattled the pair too much. They’re known for a sense of humor, after all, and were in fine form when, on the second day of Stockholm Fashion Week, they hosted a wall-to-wall blow-out party that started with a runway presentation and continued into the night as male go-go dancers (arranged via a hire-a-hunk website) performed on the bar.
Their fall collection was almost as attention-grabbing; subtle is not a word that exists in the Lazoschmidl design vocabulary. Still, both on the models and at a resee, this was the most tightly edited collection the pair have made, all while retaining their trademark ebullience. It turns out that the collection’s story was tied to a sort of out-of-this-world script Schmidl is writing, but the Lurex knits, a ringed-planet intarsia sweater, and the squarish sunglasses the models wore all communicated a sort of Space Age/Star Trek vibe even if you didn’t know the collection was titled “Planet Sex.” Illustrating the latter was an intarsia sweater—the factory that produced it dubbed it “the bird”—depicting what Schmidl described as a hand-drawn “Pompain penis.” All done for a laugh, explains Lazo. Playful in a sort of trippy way were the knit animal prints, which had a touch of The Flintstones about them and looked smashing in an over-the-top way when layered under the collection’s pièce de résistance: a tank-shaped top that had been hand-beaded in a mesh pattern on tulle in India and then cut out. It had what you might call star power.
