Multivalent icons
It’s hard to put a definitive label on fashion designers Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus’s collection, writes David Colman
LABELS. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. At least not in today’s milk-glass world of vanguard culture, where the once-distinct disciplines like dance, fashion, art, photography, food and performance have begun melding together like never before.
In some quarters, it’s now blurry enough to recall the Newton disc, a wheel of the colour spectrum that when spun at high speed turns white (or at least a nice dove grey).
The latest and most clearly confounding exemplar of this blurrealist trend opened early last month at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
Titled “Eckhaus Latta: Possessed” and delving into (and around and about) the art-inflected fashion house founded by Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus in 2011, the exhibition is almost dizzyingly multivalent.
First off, it’s not really an exhibition, because it’s also a shop — or at least a retail environment where you can browse, try on and buy the label’s clothes.
It’s not the Whitney’s own lobby-level bookstore, but in a lobby exhibition space that’s free to the public and where a store vibe seems appropriate. Even so, it is the first time the Whitney has installed a shoppable space in one of its galleries.
There are artworks (not for sale) included in the show, not Eckhaus and Latta’s own but by artists they commissioned. The installation is also kind of a performance, since the sales staff is kind of part of the project — and will actually be performing the role of salespeople through Oct 8, when the show ends.
All together, this kit and caboodle is really something else entirely, a kind of conceptual art installation that aims to encapsulate today’s fashion system (if not today’s galloping consumption of all kinds) through a distillation of our experience with shopping and clothes into a three-chambered feast for the eyes.
The first stokes future desire with light-box ad imagery; the second delivers the tangible, present pleasure of the clothes themselves; and the third space lets you look back at the past, warping your own memories of the purchase through security footage. So it’s about shopping but it’s also not about shopping. Is it art? Fashion? Here’s the thing, and it applies whether you are talking about Eckhaus Latta or their Whitney show (or about Eckhaus or Latta themselves): If you are trying to pin them down as being one thing or another, you’re already out of the game. Defying categorisation isn’t a goal or a gimmick; it’s a given. And it’s one that everything else is built upon.
“This is something we get asked a lot,” Latta said. “For us, if it wasn’t getting asked of us, we wouldn’t ask it of ourselves ever. That grey area is always where we’ve been the happiest, and not needing a definitive label.”
Articulate as Eckhaus and Latta are, they falter in describing their own style.
“We’ve always had this issue when people want us to describe the clothes or ask ‘What is Eckhaus Latta?’” Eckhaus said.
“We still don’t necessarily know how to answer those questions, but I think that’s a really exciting thing rather a detrimental one. Why does everything need to be a oneliner or an elevator pitch? Why does everything need to be so easily understood?”
Part of the reason for their insistently amorphous approach was their Artsy-cumEtsy education.
They met more than a decade ago at the Rhode Island School of Design where he was studying sculpture and she was studying textile design. They met and bonded over their shared obsession with fashion.
“We were both interested in each others closets,” Latta said.
Moving to New York in 2010, Eckhaus started designing accessories at Marc Jacobs while Latta was designing textiles.
In November 2011, they impulsively decided to submit a look to the famed fashion competition in Hyeres, France. “The day we sent it off we hadn’t slept in, like, two days, and I remember hallucinating in the post office just trying to get it out on time,” she said.
That one design gave rise to a handful of others, which they showed at a friend’s gallery on Bowery, and they were on their way.
One of the early hallmarks of their line, and their approach, is what the artist and performer Kembra Pfahler has called “availabism”, the practice of using what’s on hand or at least easily procured.
Most strikingly, that meant plastic — the kind not really meant to be worn next to the skin. One early look that generated some buzz was a high-waist pair of pants knit from tan plastic and mohair worn with mint-green patent leather-covered woodblock shoes and a double-faced cashmere vest.
“We were very into outdoor upholstery materials,” Latta said.
“It was very Home Depot,” Eckhaus added.
The charm of this approach is that it has allowed the pair to take an abstract and personal approach to runway clothes that can change from season to season without ever hewing to one aesthetic or rule.
It really is almost impossible to define the Eckhaus Latta style, though in 2015 Women’s Wear Daily came as close as anyone has to pinning it down: “a look that melds utilitarianism, pansexuality, streetwear and thrifted silhouettes into a unique, counterculture aesthetic.”
And yet if that suggests that pragmatism isn’t part of the mix, that would be wrong.
Indeed, the most surprising thing about Eckhaus Latta isn’t the edgy-chic clothes on the runway; it is the clothes in the showroom, where there are full-fledged collections of denim, knits and accessories as well as one-of-a-kind collection pieces.
“That’s the thing — we’re not artists,” Latta said. “At the end of the day, we’re serious about our business and changing the ways this industry works and working within its limitations. We can talk to you about tailoring and bias-cut dresses and knit structures all you want.”
So in an age in which binary systems, like male/female and young/old, are being rejected left and right (sorry), maybe it’s also time to retire the old canard that art is above commerce while fashion revels in it. That’s very much the message of the Whitney show.
First off, it’s not really an exhibition, because it’s also a shop — or at least a retail environment where you can browse, try on and buy the label’s clothes.
NYT