A few days before their show, Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus seemed surprised about the collection they’d made. “The idea was, ‘We want this many SKUs, and we’re going to make that many and believe in them from the beginning,’” said Latta. When they met with their stylist, Thistle Brown, to start putting together the runway show, they were convinced the collection was just “full of basics,” because in the past their design approach was much more “throw spaghetti at the wall and then edit it later,” and this time they’d been cutting as they went along. “It was a wasteful and indirect process,” Latta added.
It’s true that the pair had been thinking about basics a lot in the past few seasons, and their spring collection was as pared back as it could be, with T-shirts made from a front panel and a back panel looped around the body, barely there skirts in double-layered jersey, and dresses and trousers that snapped away. For fall, their experiment in stripping away resulted not in “basic” clothes but essential ones. The Eckhaus Latta garment essence distilled into Eckhaus Latta ur-clothes. But beyond the hoodies layered underneath chunky marled sweaters and the gentle knitted shift dresses, something else awaited. The clothes seemed to gently cradle the body: cargo pants with rounded, purse-like zippered pockets, skirts that fell apart through handkerchief hems or because they were asymmetrically wrapped around the body or through dual high slits on the sides. The show had scarcely started when I wrote down my first note, “feeling of peacefulness,” and that was before the model in the loose fisherman’s sweater (sans ribbed neck, which liberated the sweater from preppier connotations) walked by, cell phone in hand, followed by another one holding a speckled bong. Femme floral separates were taken from the Edward Steichen archive of textile design photography.
But without a doubt, leather was the star this season, a result of Eckhaus Latta’s collaboration with Ecco Kollektive. There were bonded leather hoodies with double zippers and quasi-leg-o’-mutton sleeves (in red, an instant statement of desire if ever there was one). There were also incredible “collaged” leather separates and boots in shades of cadmium yellow and black and white, where each seemed to bleed into the other like an Abstract Expressionist painting. “They have this amazing skiving machine that thins down the leather [by slicing it in half], and then the other half gets dumped in the bucket, and Mike and I just dove in there and grabbed things—sometimes you just do something intuitively and you grab these colors because they feel right in the moment,” Latta explained.
Again and again, the designers reiterated that the collection was not meant to be a fantasy. The last notes I took at the show were “These are people who know their lives, know their selves, know their essence.” Everyone walking the runway looked like they were wearing their own clothes. At our appointment, Eckhaus had declared “a sort of repulsion against the idea of dressing to exist in an edited reality,” and Latta had emphasized that their mode of working is “not based on a mood board; this is based on how we see the world and combine that together in conversation.” But you see, that’s exactly the fantasy, though it is attainable if you want it: to disconnect from the world and simply go with yourself.
