“It’s not a spoiler, it’s a tragedy.”
A–Company’s Sara Lopez skipped the spring runway season for two reasons. First, it’s better for business: Lopez has shifted to the pre-collection schedule, which is when retailers have more money to spend and more room to discover smaller and younger brands like hers. The second derives from the first: time. “It’s a quieter time, and I am a quieter brand,” she said before her presentation. “The calendar is so quick, and what you are able to do in that time period is not always something different.”
Now about the tragedy. The “something different” Lopez mentions was a staging of (part of) Sophocles’s Antigone. She worked with the director and performer Daphné Dumons to stage an open rehearsal of the play featuring only seven actors, amongst them Jeremy O. Harris and Blake Abbie. Lopez has been collecting translations of Antigone for many years, and has found herself revisiting the story time and time again. This version was written by the poet Anne Carson. “I’ve been thinking about doing Antigone, and I think that given what is happening in Gaza it could not be a more perfect story for people to hear,” said Lopez.
Prior to not-spoiling that Antigone dies in the end, Dumons offered a direct but forceful statement: “Tonight we are going to ask ourselves how to honor our dead.” Before ceding to her cast, she added: “Forbid Antigone would ever lose her screams.” And forbid Lopez ever loses sight of what matters to her, and why it should matter to us.
As for the clothes: Lopez said, “I’m leaning into imperfection, though I’m quite a perfectionist. I went to the furthest of edges I could go to push the limits of wearability, and deconstruction. I gave myself permission to not make everything wearable.”
Translated, that added up to 10 looks shown onstage and a commercial collection back in the showroom. Working with garments “that are already handled in culture”—denim separates, wool tailoring, shirting—she wrapped them around the body. Nothing was entirely functional as it should be, but that was the point. This was a collection full of interrogations. About culture, about war, about queerness, about fashion. It was undeniably a high-brow affair, but a touching one. Lopez and Dumons made time stop for 45 minutes on a busy weekday evening during a very complicated time. Conceptual as they are, though, Lopez’s clothes are honest and considerate, even austere. Peel away the layers and you’re left with the basics, nothing more than what you need.
Each season Lopez namechecks a piece of queer theory. This time it was José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. “It was an entry point into the entire collection, thinking about this queer horizon that we’re always moving towards but never going to be able to actually reach. It’s in the potentiality where utopia exists.”