A lot of fashion week is spent looking at clothes for women you don’t recognize from real life. Who are they? Where do they hang out? Not in the neighborhoods you crisscross everyday in New York City. Eckhaus Latta is the exception. With their specialties in denim and knit, the fashion they put on the runway is the fashion you see on their e-commerce site and in their stores here and in Los Angeles. Their real people casting reifies this fact; this season the actress Louisa Jacobson and the GQ editor Samuel Hine walked the runway with their familiar cast of characters.
Designers Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta were keeping it real in a group interview after the show. “There’s always been a pressure to make good fancy rich people clothes,” Latta said. They’ve always resisted, but this season they decided to push their limits and “embrace this awkwardness” (Latta), but “pair it against something that was more refined” (Eckhaus). “It was a nice way to cut out the fat between the conceptual and the things that make us more uncomfortable,” Latta added.
You could read that as a sort of code for ‘it’s time to grow up’: to dabble in spendy leather separates; to explore real shearling and faux, the latter in the form of a laminated fake fur that almost looked like feathers; and to figure out what their version of special occasion evening looks like. Answer: satin slip dresses with utilitarian strap details in the spirit of Helmut Lang. But while those were compelling, welcome developments, Eckhaus and Latta aren’t about to relinquish their cool kids cred. Their denim chaps flashed bare bits of inner thigh, their stretch jersey dresses were built with cut-outs on the hip bones, and floral print double slips rode so low they threatened to, yes, slip off.
Yin yang is built into this brand. Latta lives in LA, Eckhaus in New York. Maybe that’s why you get the kiddie stripes of shrunken sweaters on one hand, and a silk shirt, crotch hugging jeans, shrunken jacket, and shearling snood get-up on the other. Maybe not. But either way, they’re keeping it vital.
