One of many interesting details in Samuel Hines’ excellent new GQ piece about Mike Amiri is that the designer graduated summa cum laude from his history major at UCLA. Seeing the pattern of human behavior across time—how politics, morals, and aesthetics swing back and forth through the centuries and decades, with only the occasional jolt of disruption or breakthrough to upset the rhythm—is a pretty powerful asset for a fashion designer. Tonight Amiri showed his understanding of that pattern with a collection that retold overlapping moments from the past in a way that you suspect will strongly appeal to those currently inhabiting the present.
The context of the collection was LA, Amiri’s home turf and a city where he, I’m told, has become more widely worn than anywhere else. The set was loosely staged after the auditorium of a movie theater from the talkies era. The clothes, ingeniously, mixed their references from two periods further down the line; the 1950s and the 1990s. Said Amiri: “I was thinking of the mid-’90s era young actors, like a young DiCaprio, as they were at the cusp of their breakthroughs—becoming real cinema artists from their TV beginnings. So they’re dressing up but still being themselves. You’d see tailoring that almost looked thrifted in some ways, and mixed so that it gave you that chance to show up to something formal, but with a bit of informality in your own personality.”
The results played out as finely as the jazz clarinet—smooth—on an excellent soundtrack. Amiri’s wearable encapsulations of the metamorphosis into aspirational maturity mixed ’90s kick pant shapes with revival ’50s motifs including softly boxy lounge suit jacket shapes (OG Brioni) and luxuriously realized out of time textures like fleck. Jacquards depicted Old Hollywood landmarks. There was a new house monogram that had its own historical echoes. Skate sneakers, luxe-grungy cardigan knits and jeweled beanies were amongst the fresher generational accents.
Referring to his movie theater set, the designer said: “There’s this David Lynch quote that I love, where he says: “curtains can be both hiding and revealing.” There’s that feeling of mystery in waiting to see what comes next.”