Last Friday New York Fashion Week kicked off with the most unusual proposals from emerging designers, such as Hillary Taymour for Hill Strada. This brand, created on the basis of humor and the reinvention of classics, never leaves anyone indifferent and its latest show has gone around the world thanks to its unusual and surreal designs.
The brand is strongly committed to veganism and they use the loudspeaker provided by fashion to launch messages of sustainability and against animal cruelty. “We talk about it in a way that doesn’t sound so depressing and apocalyptic. Nobody is going to change the way they live if they don’t represent themselves in a fun way,” explains the creative director, and they have done the same in her latest collection.
under the name Please don’t eat my friends, Collina Strada presented to the world its proposal for autumn-winter 23/24 in which animals are the protagonists. Like Schiaparelli HC FW23, nature is the central axis of the collection, although instead of representing it in clothes, the Californian did it in the faces of her models through masks and prostheses.
Lizards, cows, rabbits, bulls, dolphins... No animal has escaped ‘climbing’ the catwalk to present the new looks for Collina Strada, although the truth is that no one has been able to stop looking the models in the face as they strutted down the catwalk.
Or well, that was just the strutting ones, because the rest of the time they were crawling, jumping, prancing, sniffing the audience, and releasing their inner animal, while wearing deer ears, pig’s snout, dog’s head, toucan’s beak and other assorted prosthetic creatures created by makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench.
Along with these unusual accessories came thes White Vans with printed hooves on top, ponytails made from balls of recycled yarn, shoulder appendages that looked like horns, and prints that looked like fur and wildflower grasses. The color scheme was like my little Ponybut a la Billie Eilish, with a soundtrack that included barking and roaring.
A The model wore Powie, the designer’s royal dog, under her arm and wearing a matching pet t-shirt over a sheer, puff-sleeved shirt. In the end, the actor Tommy Dorfman appeared in a dress bridal lingerie and rabbit ears dancing on the catwalk. The point, Hillary Taymour wrote in the show notes, was to underscore the idea that “we’re all in this together.”
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