Ones to watch: The 4 up-and-coming designers you need to know now
From ready-to-wear to footwear—check out the four designers that are on our radar.
CHLOÉ COMME PARRIS | CHRISSIE MORRIS | JOOMI LIM |
J.W. ANDERSON
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1. CHLOÉ COMME PARRIS
Sisters—literally—doing it for themselves: Say hello, girls, to Toronto’s Chloé and Parris Gordon. They’re 23 and 21, respectively, have shown but twice at Toronto fashion week, and are so fresh that their studio is also their momma’s Rosedale basement. Theirs is also one of the most-watched—and preordered (if we and our fashion friends are any indication)—new labels in Canada.
Days after their Fall 2011 show, which refined the gender- and border-crossing ideas of their debut collection, Chloé is still smiling. “It feels like everyone liked it,” she says, trying to be cautious. “Or, more importantly, what we’re trying to do.” The Gordons are reaching back into the fashion archives, all the way to the reign of Louis XIV. Chloé explains: “I’ve always been fascinated with that time and the way men dressed. They wore velvet leggings with coattails and vests. So they had structure on top and then a skinny leg. I think that’s how women want to look today—or at least, we do.”
When it comes to their designs, Chloé describes the process as organic and moody—but there are subversive elements (like sharp cutaways in soft velvet or wool, baring ribs and hipbones) that make the clothes sexy in surprising ways, seemingly layered with meaning. “We do want the clothes to be sexy, but not obviously sexy, more tough,” says Chloé. “Although Parris would say more romantic. I’m the tomboy—I always hated being a girl. Parris loved it.” They both chose to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and began working out their dream, financing their first collection with the money they made from selling jewellery at local boutiques.
Jewellery—for fall, in the form of heavy, shattered-crystal chains—plays an important role in their collection; it’s mostly designed by Parris and produced locally. Chloé focuses on textiles. While that’s quite enough to base a label on, the girls are already venturing into bags. This season’s runway hit was a perfect hybrid of rucksack and handbag, slung with silver buckles. “One thing we didn’t agree on,” says Chloé, laughing, “was who got to wear the backpack first.” And yes, we can already imagine Chloé Comme Parris inspiring girl fights everywhere.
2. CHRISSIE MORRIS
Some high-fashion heel-makers should really walk a mile in their own shoes before inflicting them on the rest of us. Well, the rising Brit cobbler Chrissie Morris—being a woman and all—has done exactly that, and through three pregnancies, no less. “I wore the Amelias a lot,” says 34-year-old Morris, referring to her slim-but-sturdy buckled sandal in glimmering stingray. “I don’t think chunky heels will ever really go out. They’re always going to serve that purpose and be more comfortable. A thin heel you wear more at night, for occasions. But I personally feel the chunkier heel will be more important to the future.”
In that future, Morris is smartly carving out a niche: shoes that look arty—mostly art deco–y, really—and not wacky, and whose Christian Louboutin–comparable prices are justified because they’re handcrafted and produced in a proper Italian factory. On this last point, Morris is passionate. “The factory we’ve bought here, in Bologna, is one of the last remaining luxury factories in the region. Factories are closing all the time and they need more help from both the government and the press. It’s so costly in Italy, this level of craftsmanship. I think the future of Italian footwear lies in exploiting the factories to their full potential.”
Morris comes by this opinion honestly, having done her master’s in fashion design at Milan’s Domus Academy. She then moved to the East End in London, where she began creating bespoke shoes and accessories for celebrities and other designers. Her debut collection in Spring 2008 established her luxotic look from the outset. Since then, she’s been growing her business surely, without all the starry hype of, say, a Nicholas Kirkwood or Charlotte Olympia. Morris, who began sketching fashion ideas at the green age of 11, has always loved shoes, though not in that obsessive “aholic” way. She might have a footstep follower in her first son (she has three children, all boys).“I’m not joking,” she says, although she is laughing. “His first word was ‘shoes.’”
Her family divides its time between London and Italy—either Bologna, where the factory is, or Sicily—but it’s Paris, and its extravagant art deco period, on which a Chrissie Morris shoe is built. You can see it in the curvilinear shapes, the eclecticism of the materials, the retro modernism. “That period doesn’t stop to amaze me. The more I look to it for inspiration, I find something that wows me every time,” she says. “They always had an idea on the future.” There she goes, talking about the future again, and striding—comfortably—into it.
3. JOOMI LIM
We fight all the time,” says New York jeweller Joomi Lim, 46, of her design partner, Xavier Ricolfi, 38, who is also her husband. “We communicate loudly,” says Ricolfi, tongue presumably in cheek.
The opposite-attractive pair—she’s Korean-American and a self-proclaimed fashion girl, he’s an industrial designer from Paris—are certainly being heard loudly in the accessories market today. Working together in their Chelsea loft, they’ve hit on a winning alchemy of precious and punkish, romantic and hard, trendy and clean. Industrial bits mix with fresh pearls, or waterfalls of crystal and fringe. Spikes are transformed from a two-years-ago trend into something intriguing, by way of coating them with mermaid-green titanium. (“You see it on objects,” explains Lim, “but hardly at all in jewellery.”) They’re also experimenting with tinier and tinier spikes—or as Lim calls them, adorably, “love thorns.” And new designs (including skulls, which are big this fall) are rendered by Ricolfi in a 3-D program, making the pieces more original and less production-dependent.
All that, manufactured locally, and Joomi Lim pieces are still less expensive than those of competitors. Like, say, Eddie Borgo? “He does amazing work and is getting so much attention,” says Lim. “We’re jealous! No, just kidding.” Besides, for the customers Lim and Ricolfi covet, a great deal of the appeal lies in not having the best-selling Barneys brand of the moment. “It’s not luxury by having a high price,” says Ricolfi, “but by having a good distribution model, being in nice independent stores.” (He and Lim don’t advertise, seek out big-name buyers or rely on pr. When stars from Rihanna on down are flaunting their goods, why should they?) “We’ve been lucky to have celebrities find us,” Lim concedes. “Although we got a bit nervous when we saw [a photo of] Jessica Alba carrying her baby with all our spikes on her arm! Maybe don’t do that.”
No, but do wear the spikes. And the “love rings.” And the titanium three-inch cuffs. And the fringe. “I wear all of it!” says Lim. “I mean, not an entire collection, but I mix and match.
I don’t think it’s too much.” And Ricolfi, minimalist though he is, knows better than to argue.
4. J.W. ANDERSON
It’s out of control!” Designer J.W. Anderson is talking about: a) Phoebe Philo’s latest collection for Céline; b) a chocolate-mint ice cream cone; c) some dude carrying a boom box up Saint-Laurent; d) all of the above. The correct answer, of course, is D. It so happens that Irish-born Anderson (who, at 26, is one of the most exciting young womenswear and menswear designers in the game) is also the most excitable. When I meet him one afternoon in Montreal at the Aldo headquarters, where he’s collaborating with the brand on a Spring 2012 footwear collection, he complains of jetlag. All right, cool, but his “jetlag” makes an Adderall high look like a disco nap. Rangy and rarely still, with Irish blue eyes and an actor’s habit of running cool hands through a perfect coif, he talks like you blink: constantly.
It’s hardly all about himself, though there’s much to discuss. Anderson’s talent is magnetic. Even before graduating in menswear from the London College of Fashion, he assisted the stylist/photographer Manuela Pavesi, which led to dressing store windows for her best friend. (Her name’s Miuccia. Ring a bell?) In 2007 he debuted an accessories collection, which led to a boyswear look that became signature: private-school rebel with a lick of Victorian eccentricity. In 2010, he began translating his aesthetic for the other sex, tailoring womenswear to fit as it might on boys (snug, enticingly awkward). His third womenswear show (this past February) starred lush paisleys, swishy pleats and strict tailoring with outbursts of pure white mohair—a brilliant collection, and welcome proof that the masculine/feminine look will forever yield new revelations; he was the talk of all London town that week.
But Jonathan—his given name—would rather talk about, oh, everyone else in fashion. He is possessed of endless hearsay, cocksure opinions and a candour so disarming that sometimes I cover my tape recorder. But it’s refreshingly clear that, unlike other young designers who front like they’re anti-fashion, Anderson reveres his world. He believes fully in Alaïa, Balenciaga, Céline. In fact, mid-interview he whips out his laptop to look at resort shows on Style.com.
Near the end of our talk, which has turned into a long, cross-city walk, Anderson slows a little. He worries his success is too sudden; he’s already won a Topshop Newgen sponsorship, met Anna Wintour and been in the right magazines. “I don’t want to have ‘a moment,’” he says, “because what happens when it’s over?” But soon enough, he’s talking about more shoes to design, and whether he wants to do sunglasses, and how soon his brand might become profitable. Moment or not, it seems J.W. Anderson is—as he wouldn’t say—totally in control.
