Photos: Victor Boyko ©
Natalia Alaverdian’s obsessive love of film is well-documented. This season she directs, as much as designs, a collection for a cast of characters in an imagined movie. Her synopsis: “a Soviet aerobics class – sent to space.”
This is how Alaverdian does drama. Wearers (and devoted fans) of A.W.A.K.E. Mode are, invariably, interested in duality. The label is defined by knowing contrasts; this season a spirit of cheeriness and sporty ease lives in zipped-up fine-knit track tops, offset by the drama and severity of a black silk frock coat, or the Kubrickian melodrama of an iridescent tailored twin-set.
There is no one ‘woman’ – there could never be. This season Alaverdian imagines playwrights and prodigies, geeks and cinephiliacs (fans of The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s 2001 masterwork, will no doubt sense some of its preppy spirits in these clothes.) Boys in bands offer as much inspiration as female frontwomen, Jim Morrison starring front-and-centre on the mood board. Alaverdian weaponises her customers with a contained wit that’s entirely hers.
Much of this work deals in ‘interruption’ – an impulsive flash of zebra cotton twill at the cuff of a blazer sleeve; shimmering sequins set against heavy herringbone checks. There’s a Space-Odyssey-strangeness and brilliance to holographic hero pieces – to the touch, they feel like paper, some almost like a tarpaulin. Pleated lamé flows throughout. Amidst the exuberance, there’s a calm reassertion of house signatures in masterfully tailored day dresses, alongside taken-apart and remixed suiting.
A.W.A.K.E. Mode’s accessories offering, which continues to take off as an enormous part of the brand’s global business, is once again expanded. Alaverdian considered the pieces a kind of ‘armoury for space creatures’ – tasselled leather mules, turbo-sized quilted bags, sculpted metalwork. The jewellery (Alaverdian’s personal passion project this season) is fluid, almost alien. There is no such thing as straightforward simplicity in the world of A.W.A.K.E. – executed in vegan leather, the accessories collection is a meaningful example of the madness, method, and technical perfectionism which this label does so well.
Stylist: Natalia Alaverdian
Casting Director: Simone Schofer
Photographer: Victor Boyko
Backstage Photographer: Pablo Ravazzani
Videographer: Clint Trofa
Hair Stylist: Louis Ghewy using R+Co.
Make-Up Artist: Mathias Van Hooff using SUQQU
Production: James Tregaskes
Music: Toliktyler
Communications: RAVEN
