So his decision to reveal his first women’s wear line for his own brand via an 18-minute dual-gender film was both entirely in character and pretty smart. It was a way to tamp down expectations — sky high after his stints at Jil Sander, Dior and Calvin Klein and his first show last month as co-creative director of Prada — and give himself room to construct his own universe. Or expand it, anyway.

So in a surreal wood straight out of a campy horror movie, saturated with intimations of doom and shades of indigo, blue and violet, lemon and chartreuse, a host of disaffected youth (youth culture is one of Mr. Simons’s signature obsessions) came crawling through a landscape of dead trees and fraying nets. They were propped up limply against a wall or sprawled out in a web, wearing layers of alienation and grace. There were second-skin tattoo undershirts or silks printed in psychedelic Pucci-inspired swirls, sleeveless coats fraying at the edges, and long dresses caught at the hip with a button reading “Free Admission With This Button.”

Mr. Simons has an affinity for words, though that kind of irony played better than the messages shirts and hoodies blaring the more self-consciously pretentious “Children of the Revolution” and “Muted Chaos” (even if “Teen Dreams” was the title of the whole thing and those are, pretty much by definition, self-consciously pretentious). As did the slithery sapphire pencil skirts and oily plastic vests that transformed tailored jackets into corseted, peplum tops in tones of falling leaves.

In the end, despite the “Nightmare on Elm Street” overlay, you couldn’t escape the sensation that the show was a pretty effective, and effectively alluring, expression of the liminal state in which we are all currently trapped.

Source: New York Times

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