Proenza Schouler SS19

There’s a pleasing circularity to the thought that Proenza Schouler, after two seasons in Paris, would return to New York and land on the work of Isa Genzken: the 70-year old artist who calls Berlin home, but has harbored a spiritual connection to New York City since her teens. When she started out in the ‘70s, shaped by Postwar Germany, her highly-charged structural assemblages sparked a special resonance between Europe and the USA. Built from naked construction materials and bright manmade detritus, they show a spirit caught between a state of stimulation and decay; the richness of the city VS resistance to corporate concrete. Reading as manifestos for a more meaningful “accidental modernity”, it makes sense that Genzken’s apathy to the art of others would relent for a design force like Céline, which sponsored her MoMA retrospective in 2013, and more pressingly, Proenza.

The artist’s work littered the warehouse where the clothes would be unveiled, mannequins draped with ragged shirts, sleep masks and cellophane bags; a preamble to the haphazard proportions to come. Bleached denim bore a mottled acid wash, sleeves and shoulders a little too big, hems hitting a divisive mid-length you’ll either relish for its revolution or write off as tone-deaf. Cracked foiled leather scintillates traditional tailoring, while humble utility cloths bear their makers marks, overstitched with structural seams. Perhaps what McCollough and Hernandez learned from Paris was that there’s little beauty to be drawn from the circumspect. The City of Lights twinkles, but it takes more than charm to gloss the City That Never Sleeps.