woman at work

In our Concept Development class at Parsons, we have an assignment called "Opposite Designer."  The teacher assigns each student a designer that she thinks is the opposite of who that student is as a designer.  The student must then pretend that (for some reason) she has been hired by said designer and has to design a small collection as though she were working for that label.

This past Friday I was assigned my opposite designer, and it happens to be none other than Jeremy Scott.  Seeing as how most people reading this blog don't know me all that well, I assure you it doesn't get more opposite from me than Jeremy Scott.  My first task was to get familiar with his work, and so I started looking through his collections one by one.  Initially, I felt hopeless - seeing models go down a runway looking like Flintstones (see his Spring/Summer 2010 collection titled "Bone to be Wild") brought tears to my eyes, and not in a good way.

But I know this man is wildly successful, and Karl Lagerfeld himself has said that he is the only designer who could follow him at Chanel, so I grew determined to find out why.  I went back a few more seasons and landed on Scott's Spring/Summer 2008 collection titled "Men at Work."  As the title suggests, Scott's inspiration was construction workers and construction sites.

He had me at look #1:

There are many reasons I find this collection absolutely brilliant, and saw some common ground with Scott based on his sense of humor.  But this is a hat blog, after all, and the manhole (trash can?) cover hats became a big attraction for me as I looked at more photos:

I flipped through the collection again and again.  And (I can't believe these words will come out of my keyboard, but here it is) I discovered that the parallel I was drawing in my head was to Christian Dior's 1947 "New Look" collection:

A big part of it has to do with the poses - the slouch, the exaggerated angles, the wide brim framing a delicate, glamorous face.

But it was the video of the show that truly brought these hats to life:

Seeing them bounce and dance around the models' heads as they walked nonchalantly on the runway was borderline hypnotizing, not to mention extremely entertaining.  To be sure, it would take a certain kind of woman to wear something like this (and I'm not even sure these hats ever ended up in a retail environment)...  But if wit belongs on the head, then this definitely fits the bill.