Opening Ceremony has gone to the dogs this season. As in, literally: Carol Lim and Humberto Leon’s latest collection was sparked by obsessive viewing of the recent Westminster Dog Show—the one where someone was murdered, for those of you who weren’t paying such close attention. Leon and Lim were taken in by the competition’s polished pedigreed pups, and they indulged themselves in some reverie about what kind of women might own them. Their clothes this season represented an extended conjecture in answer to that question. They imagined an upscale suburb, a touch late ’70s in tone, all manicured landscaping and parking lots. They imagined, too, a woman of great feminine refinement, but involved with a guy who was macho and a bit rough. With that in mind, they mixed pencil-shaped dresses, trim geometric outerwear, and flounced skirts with tough-guy staples such as heavy-duty motorcycle jackets and tracksuit tops. There was a certain froideur to the looks, undercut, here and there, by the fluidity of pieces like a short black dress with waterfall sleeves, or a spaghetti-strap sheath that featured undulating printed pleats. And then, too, Lim and Leon turned the somewhat forbidding attitude of their clothes on its head by integrating playful motifs, notably the shaggy komondor dog prints and embroideries. A pencil dress in the dog print, with a bit of eyelash embellishment added to drive the shagginess home, was perhaps paradigmatic of the collection as a whole, in its fusion of punctiliousness and whimsy. It made you wonder what the movie American Hustle might have been like if Wes Anderson had directed it. Or how Francis Ford Coppola might have fared, circa The Conversation, if he’d taken on the script for Best in Show.
Opening Ceremony
