Maisie Schloss of Maisie Wilen is another designer who decided to stay off the runways this season, opting for a digital release. It feels fitting, then, that she discussed her latest collection over Zoom. For fall, after all, she was looking at the contrasts between digital and tactile.
“This season I was really interested in continuing to study digital imagery by placing it alongside craft and industrial materials,” she said. The lookbook opened with a paper bag as a dress, and looks were accessorized with paper ties, rubber band jewelry, and even an inflatable packaging boa. Literal as it sometimes was, Schloss was onto an interesting idea. “These two things have so many juxtapositions, they bring out the familiar in the foreign, and even the rudimentary in the pristine,” she said.
Schloss’s goal was to decontextualize and to “make things look foreign.” This she did by placing classic white briefs on the runway next to outer garments, making a dress out of soccer balls, and applying what she called digitally rendered “uncanny faces” onto bags and oversized tees. Digital imports into the IRL world included stock images of offices as a repeat graphic, grass and corrugated metal prints, and, most humorously, a repeat of the classic placeholder text “lorem ipsum,” which many folks will be seeing for the first time in the world outside their computer screens.
An optic print was exposed over the uncanny faces, making them look like a glitch; this same graphic was exported onto brushed wool sweaters, cleverly making the digital as tactile as possible. Schloss offered true menswear styles this season, too. She said that men wear her clothes all the time anyways, so this was more about making it official and offering the right grading and sizing—she joins the ranks of designers like Peter Do and Simone Rocha who launched men’s last season with similar ideas.
Wilen has made technology and imagery her personal brand language, and juxtaposing her digital nativeness with the analogue and tactile is something worth expanding on.
