At Area’s tenth anniversary show this morning, you could hear the models’ Cuban-heeled boots stomping on the runway before you saw the first look: a navy suit with a wide shouldered jacket, accessorized with a matching officer’s cap worn low on the face, obscuring the eyes but not the attitude. “It’s been 10 years of huge independence, 10 years of championing creativity, people, inclusivity; so we were like, ‘OK, what is this collection going to be about?’” Piotrek Panszczyk said during a preview at the Area showroom a few days before the show. “We were looking back at what we did, in a sense, but we would never do a greatest hits collection, so we were thinking about, ‘what is the key thing that really defines us?’” In a very meta way, searching for the thing that exemplified their identity became the very thing that they based their collection around.
At Area the creative process is heavy on exploration, collaboration, and exhausting the threads that an idea or a concept can lead to. “Identity can refer to belonging or not belonging, it can be a comfort or it can not be—it can be an annoyance to be identified,” said Panszczyk. The obvious place to begin was, of course, the thumbprint—the singular thing that identifies each and every one of us. Blown-up and in a shade of black on brown, the pattern became a sort of animal print, used to great effect on a Mugler-esque jacket with impossibly wide shoulders, an extra wide and extra tall lapel, tightly cinched at the waist with an oversized belt, and on a very feminine strapless mid-length dress with an ample dropped-waist skirt. Thumbprints also decorated the seasonal hardware whose shapes were inspired by “name plates, plaques, and office doors,” although the result was more Georgia O’Keeffe Southwestern jewelry than standard uniform fare, meaning something closer to humanity and the natural world—which Panszczyk welcomed. That tension was also present in a group of worn-in leather pieces in shiny black with tanned edges, among the collection’s best.
Denim is a big part of Area’s business, but this season was all about leather; moto-jackets, baggy workwear-inspired pants, and bustiers in shiny black leather with worn-in tanned edges. Another moto-jacket, a vest and a skirt were embellished with an abundance of beads, spikes, sequins, and all other types of decoration found in the designer’s storage. The three pieces shown on the runway were one-of-a-kind, hand-made in-house, and available only by special order. Not surprisingly, hands ended up becoming another motif in the collection: traces of hands, like the kind that kids make in elementary school and eventually turn into turkeys, were cut out from silk taffeta and appliquéd into gowns in the same manner as one would use feathers. They were woven (not printed) onto jeans like so many pairs in the 1980s; and they were printed, in bright red, on a black T-shirt in the same position as a woman might place her hands against her stomach while yelling “bans off our bodies” at a protest. It was part of a collaboration with Tinder, a sponsor of the show, which agreed to donate $25,000 to Planned Parenthood in the brand’s name.
“The most important thing for us is to be an individual and to always make your own choices,” Panszczyk added. “It was really important for us to showcase that in this collection.”