“I get high on your memory,” purred a voice on the soundtrack of Area’s Spring 2020 show. It’s a funny thought for a brand that has been, with its slick lamé catsuits and spacey embossed tees, very much about the future of fashion. Maybe we should take it as a sign that our collective future is quite dark that Beckett Fogg and Piotrek Panszczyk decided to shine their light on the craftsmanship and couture shapes of the past so strongly this season.
Notes of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Christian Dior were felt in pouf-backed dresses and one romantically quirky lavender bubble coat. Let’s call those cropped blazer and miniskirt suits the New New Look, a clever subversion of ladylike attire for the Area woman who’d rather show off her waist than have it nipped in by darted fabric. Some of the pair’s most inspiring and wondrous interpretations of couture craft were their metal cage dresses, rendered with trellis-like arches glimmering in golden crystals. Those pieces, an evolution of Area’s slinky crystal chain mail, are an apt synthesis of their themes here: a little retro, a little futuristic, a lot about being the star of the show no matter where you are.
Fogg and Panszczyk’s seasonal research can take them to places far and wide, though. Multiculturalism, inclusivity, and diversity are the core values of Area, notions they have translated on the runway since the start of their brand. Here, they translated Area into dozens of languages and cut the translations into nameplate necklaces. Backstage, Panszczyk acknowledged that black culture of the American ’80s and ’90s was an inspiration, with the goal of breaking down boundaries and unifying the idea of Area into something from everyone, for everyone. The soundtrack chirped on “think positive.” Wish that it could be this easy.
