Review of Jordanluca Spring 2024 Fashion Show
A Thorn in the Flesh
By Mark Wittmer
While women’s looks and gender fluid styling and casting have always been a part of Jordanluca’s MO since it burst onto the Milan scene four years ago, Spring 2024 was the first time the brand officially shared a full women’s collection alongside the men’s. The idea of the binary and exploiting and overcoming its oppositions was the driving force of the collection, which was the design duo of Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto’s most psychosexual and gripping to date.
This dualism was embodied in the roses and thorns that spiked their way throughout the collection (a recurring theme for the designers, though this time around things felt more thorn-forward), as well as and especially in the use of latex, which conjured in a single moment the hospital, the slaughterhouse, and the sex dungeon: birth, life, sex, and death in one.
The multi-purpose material was used to spectacular effect as a pink sheath dress slightly more than a third of the way through the show. Designed perfectly in tune with the properties of the material, it moved beautifully with the movements of its wearer as it clung to the body, revealing and concealing at once – and of course conjuring up all the various uses of latex at once.
This daring and decisive use of material construction carried across the whole collection as the design duo played with hybridity and inversion, or blurred the lines between underwear and outerwear. Even as categories were distorted, however, a strong and distinct sense of the masculine and the feminine come through as touches like shoulder pads or cinched waists emphasize archetypal bodily forms and specific geocultural references like Wall Street suiting and western wear make appearances.
For a collection that feels so provocative and distinct, it would be surprising for the spring season cliché of floral print to make an appearance, but that it does. And yet it totally works with the collection’s reconsideration of typical gender codes and dressing conventions, especially as the thorns feel more emphasized than their petaled counterparts. These thorns also angularly jut out of shoes and cascaded down handbag straps, but it was in the sculptural jewelry – earrings, cuffs, and neckpieces – that their impact was felt most sharply.
The brand’s press release shared that Leonard Lauder’s coinage of the “Lipstick Index” – the supposed pattern that lipstick sales are inversely commensurate with the health of the economy (which has actually been discredited, but that’s not the point) was a foundational reference for the collection. As we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about moving into a recession any time now and how fashion will respond to this economic shift, the reference feels especially apt.
But Jordanluca have responded to this anxiety by defying it, and electrifyingly so; instead of advocating for sensible wardrobe investments (like many of their more established contemporaries), they take a deep dive into the paradoxes of human fears and longings, with all of the sexual tension, violence, and fracturing of identity therein. Thrilling, eerie, sexy, and off-putting, the collection cements Jordanluca as having one of the most exciting and provocative new perspectives on fashion today.