A best-seller is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it brings in some good ol’ cash flow and helps build a label’s cultural cache, but on the other, it can cause fatigue. Maisie Schloss has had somewhat of a hit on her hands with her perforated knits for her Maisie Wilen label, but their popularity also had the designer in limbo between exploring new things and delivering to her customers. “I started to feel a little angsty towards them the last couple of seasons because they have been so popular,” said Schloss, calling from her apartment in California. “They were inhibiting me from showing new things because people were focused on them, while I’m like, ‘Hey, look at this other stuff I made!’ but this season I’ve fallen in love with the fabric all over again.”
This rekindling was provoked by Schloss switching up her design methodology this season. This is a designer known for her URL-heavy design vernacular, with digital prints and optical illusions often taking the spotlight in collections. “Previously, I’ve been almost entirely digital,” said Schloss, explaining that everything from her sketching to her silhouette development was mostly done digitally. “Once it was all finalized on the computer I’d make the actual things, it was all very calculated,” she continued. There is a practicality to working that way, but Schloss is right to underscore how this approach often leads to a more neatly packed result, which is efficient but not always the most exciting.
Instead, this season Schloss closed her laptop and ventured into the streets of Los Angeles to scour for deadstock materials, exchanging her meticulously pre-planned lineups for a more improvised and material-led design approach. She wrapped the body in raffia and threaded vintage beads together to create funky separates that hung away from the body like bejeweled fishing nets, and took her existing fabrics—such as that famous perforated jersey—and gave them a sense of novelty with winding and twisting draping.
“It feels like fine art, observing an image and creating it simultaneously,” said Schloss of her new methodology, which gave her collection a sense of dimension. “I was like, ‘I have to log off for a minute,’” the designer joked. Good thing she did.