The cathedral window is WDW’s signature motif; making it dimensional was this season’s challenge. This treatment was used in men’s tailoring. Those arches, placed on the hips of a gray leather dress, looked a bit like panniers. Imagining what WDW could look like on the red carpet was one of the challenges the designers set themselves this season, and likely explains the number of women’s looks. Last season’s collection was only menswear, and that category remains the brand’s strength. The Victorian references were less literal when it came to the guys. Among the standout dresses was the finale look, a draped wedding gown with a pouf skirt in a kind of Marie Antoinette style, look 38, a draped column. The bandeau and ball skirt of painstakingly distressed denim not only had an ethereal beauty but it spoke to one of the collection’s central tenets, which was, D’Amore explained, “the whole idea that you can’t have beauty without a little bit of ruin.”
New York Fashion Week hasn’t seen much of the kind of beauty, or been exposed to the references, that WDW brings to it, because there have been so few Black designers participating. This season’s collection included a collaboration with Pelle Pelle. For Bravado, that was a real New York moment. “This is what I’ve seen growing up, and obviously I couldn’t afford it, but now I have the opportunity to collaborate. [These jackets] were huge in the late ’90s and early ’00s and worn by the likes of Dipset and Jay-Z,” said the designer. On the back of one of them was embroidered what Bravado called “our Mount Rushmore,” featuring portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass. When looking back at headpieces from the Victorian era, D’Amore saw a similarity to durags and married the two into a lace hybrid that added a transcendent touch to the collection.