“They’re these sort of very generic pieces that have been fucked in a very gentle way,” Neil Grotzinger said of their spring collection, which they presented as an extension of the ideas they explored last season, of reconsidering the formality and the way most clothes can be, or are, generic products. “It’s this feeling of things that are very, very high and very, very low, blended together.”
This time around, Grotzinger focused on what they do best: ornamenting and reinventing. This is a designer whose technical eye is ingenious and robust, but most impressive this season was the way Grotzinger embellished a lineup of T-shirts and shirts upcycled into precious items covered in hot-fix crystals, each applied by hand. There were teddy bears and stilettos and even little shimmering trinkets hanging from each piece. They were cute and fun and covetable. They were simple, too, as cute T-shirts are; but they had been intervened to become opulent, almost formal styles.
“I think that’s becoming such a token of my personal style,” Grotzinger said of the new formality they’d been considering for the season—embellishments, tailoring, and such—which two entire generations, including both theirs and that of their students at the Parsons School of Design, have made their own by taking it out of context. “It’s being chaotic, not giving a shit, but still putting themselves together in a way that’s like, ‘if I have to be at an occasion or event, I’m going to be antagonistic in some way.’”