Review of Sportmax Fall 2023 Fashion Show
Second Skin
By Mark Wittmer
A largely unsung hero of contemporary fashion, Sportmax continued to dig deep for Fall 2023 and delivered an excellent collection that explored familiar synthetic points of departure – cross-cultural and historic references, high-low layering – in a way that felt totally new and totally now.
Bringing together a lush mix of materials and under-recognized historical reference, Sportmax offers a vision of contemporary womanhood that is unbound by gender archetypes and class constraints.
The show’s setting saw its audience invited to sit together on tattered sofas and armchairs, while models strode down a runway cobbled together from unfinished pieces of wood, creating an atmosphere that was grunge-inflected yet elevated, trans-historical yet contemporary, organic yet artificial. This mood was given further direction from the spaghetti-western inspired soundtrack by composer Teho Teardo.
A few references to the world of country-western could indeed be detected woven subtly throughout the collection: wide collars and lapels, duster coats, the cowboy-inspired boots, snakeskin, the faux tails of raccoons and other desert critters that hung from belt loops like trophies of the hunt, and the consistent color palette that could be said to echo both desert landscapes and a spectrum of skin tones.
These western references cohabitate with other nods to more recent historical eras of dressing, combining together into a statement that feels distinctly contemporary. The strong shoulders and wide legs of the tailoring looks draw from both zoot suits and teddy girls (a largely forgotten subcultural aesthetic moment that was way ahead of its time in terms of resisting mainstream notions of gender expression), pushing a sense of glam androgyny: the luxury of not being forced into any gender archetype or any time.
The layered liquidity of the many excellent dresses is harder to pin down; intentional yet off-kilter knotting and twisting makes them both respond to and disrupt the body’s natural form, while the designer’s unique mixing of materials makes them feel like products of bourgeois elegance and yet grounded in everyday life. Shimmering skirts are layered under asymmetrical sweaters fastened by elastic suspender straps; fluffy fringe juxtaposes the angularity of shoulders and shoes.
Considering its boundary-blurring ideas of androgyny, organic versus artificial, body versus adornment, the collection’s flesh-tone color scheme – as well as its use of snakeskin – comes further into focus.
The collection treats the idea of fashion and dressing as a second skin in one of the most convincing and powerful ways we’ve seen; the idea of bareness or nudity becomes more than a conversation between concealing and revealing, but also a celebration of the freedom to embrace or reject clichés and expectations, to use the body and its shifting status as landscape and canvas as the ultimate tool for self-expression.