Few fashion houses have a a mantra like D.E.– Dress Easy, and a film showcased at the Sundance Film Festival.. The orchestrator behind it all: Adrien Sauvage, founder of the House of A. Sauvage. In 2011, Sundance film Festival showcased This is Not A Suit, a sort of existential enquiry about the designer and his collection, reminiscent of Absurdist plays such as those by Samuel Beckett. The film features Sauvage in a room in solitude, as a voice over explains,“the art of D.E.”

The film is also the title of an ongoing project that involves Sauvage dressing those close to his heart–from filmmakers and musicians like Spike Jonze, Terry Gilliam, and Eliot Sumner, to sports veterans like Sauvage himself, who was a professional basketball player during his youth. Changing focus from sports to the art of Savile Row at 20, every representation of Sauvage’s brand is striking. His methodology of creating suits according to activity (for example, what is the perfect suit for grabbing a cup of coffee?), the presentation of his collection, both still and in motion, and the words used to string all elements together–Sauvage is a creator who knows what he’s doing and it comes through in everything he does. Sauvage’s aim is to create a timeless existence, unconfined by seasons and trends. As the voice over states in This is Not A Suit, Sauvage indeed “constructs his own time” and this is what makes his brand so seductive.

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From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

Late one afternoon in November I was walking along my street in the Lower East Side when I bumped into Miguel Adrover, the influential fashion designer who left New York in 2004. It was the first time I’d seen him in several years and he looked upbeat, excited even. He’d just gotten to town that day, he said, and he was happy to be back in his old neighborhood where he had lived and worked for many years. After a moment, he leaned in and said, “I’m coming back. I’m showing in New York again.”
     This was big news from the man who electrified the New York fashion world at the end of the 1990s, and it’s been carefully guarded until just this week. Saturday, Miguel will show his first collection in New York City in nearly eight years, returning to the Lower East Side theater where he started it all with his now-legendary Manaus-Chiapas-NYC collection.
     During the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Miguel Adrover was one of my favorite New Yorkers. He truly exemplified the spirit of the city at the dawn of a new century. An immigrant from Spain, he made Manhattan his home and embraced it so completely and exuberantly that, through his work, he was able to give ordinary New Yorkers a heightened awareness of what a unique and special place they inhabited. Often, he would wax poetic about the city in the most surprisingly original and insightful ways.

Newcomer Ellinor Malmgren’s aesthetic often gets called a certain 4-letter word typical of fashion designers who privilege risk over playing it safe: bold. The word seems appropriate enough given the types of materials Malmgren selects for her pieces, like stretch-infused leather and razor-thin metal –– and the very exacting color palette she insists they be (think deep Prussian blue, stark charcoal, and matte gold); if you factor in the extravagant silhouettes taking shape from her imagination, the word seems practically tailor-made.
     The result of such “bold” thinking is a strangely-alluring debut collection that reads equal parts confident and mysterious, slightly futuristic – with a healthy subversive streak hell-bent on dismissing the standard notion of hourglass femininity – rather than yielding to it. Jackets with distorted shoulders and hip pockets wide like hula hoops aren’t exactly synonymous with ladylike style; here, they possess a strong appeal in spite of this (or perhaps because of it). Effortless comes in with what’s intentionally left out: ornamentation. It’s not that detail doesn’t interest Malmgren (her cage-like metal cuffs and neck pieces offer proof); it’s simply that communicating her point of view comes at its most natural when relayed through form rather than content.

Beauty and creativity can emerge in even the thorniest economy, as manifested by BOFFO Building Fashion, an exciting series where architects and fashion designers collaborate to create pop-up shops. With the support of CFDA, Supima Cotton and Architizer, Building Fashion had a successful premiere in 2010 at HL23 underneath the High Line. This year, Building Fashion will feature five installments and take place at Karkula, located at 50 Walker Street in Tribeca.
     A designer’s work is oftentimes presented in a department store or boutique alongside dozens of collections. Building Fashion, however, gives designers the opportunity have their own freestanding store as well as a space that reflects their personalities. According to Nicola Formichetti, the first designer to be featured in the series, “This is the opportunity to look directly into my head.” Nicola’s, by Gage/Clemenceau Architects, literally reflects Formichetti’s style, with mirrored prisms serving as the ceiling and walls.

Forty-two years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the bulky, crinkly white spacesuit he wore remains an icon of the space age. While the suit was engineered by NASA to meet exacting technical standards, it was actually assembled by underwear seamstresses. This is just one intriguing aspect of spacesuit design that’s documented in the new book “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo,” by Nicholas de Monchaux.
     When NASA first engineered the suits for the Apollo missions they wanted them to have a cold, hard, mechanical look. But the shell-like suit prototypes they produced, which made astronauts look like the Michelin Man, weren’t especially comfortable or flexible. So NASA used layers of lighter materials stitched together. The special twenty-one-layer assembly they devised had nylon inside for comfort, teflon outside for protection, and rubber-dipped fabrics in between to withstand pressure.

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Fashion and fetish have long been cultural bedfellows. Steeped in fantasy, obsession and sex both compliment and provoke each other. This kinky kinship is infusing the runways this season – restrained silhouettes nipped at the waist, fetishized footwear from lace-up boots to furry stilettos and leather everywhere – channeling in a subversive new trend. At the forefront of fashion’s strict new discipline is the London-based design duo Fleet Ilya. The husband and wife team are making worldwide waves with their handcrafted leather accessories.
     Ilya Fleet trained as a saddlery craftsman before using his trade to create the label’s collection of luxury bondage accessories, Restraint. Resha Sharma joined Ilya as creative partner with a graphic design degree from Central Saint Martins and brought the label into the fashion realm with a collection of women’s accessories. Now both their bondage and fashion pieces can be found accessorizing international fashion editorials and at the world’s top boutique and concept stores.

In the troubled southern suburbs of Brazzaville, the Congo’s capital city, a resilient group of men have traded arms for Armani. The sapeurs, as captured in Daniele Tamagni & Africolor at Danziger Proejcts through September 10th, are Congolese men who abide by a strict moral code that’s signaled publicly by their equally rigorous dress rules. Tamagni, an Italian photographer working in several African regions, has produced photographs that reveal men in impeccably tailored, brilliantly colored three-piece suits, brandishing canes and cigars in the middle of slum neighborhoods. These men save up for months—often years—for an outfit.
     Though the Sape movement first gained popularity as a way of resisting the 1970s national ban on western clothing, Tamagni no longer sees it as politically motivated. Today he sees it as both a form of “social affirmation,” and as an art in its own right. Not only is “dressing up a way to escape and forget poverty…but also their aesthetic is amazing, because they re-mix and re-interpret the Western brand outfits.” If fashion has truly become a life philosophy for the sapeurs, it’s clear that it’s a living, breathing dogma. “It’s a mix of dandyism with old colonial accessories and hip-hop style,” Tamagni explains. “It’s impossible to define their aesthetic.”

It takes something special to get fashion’s more jaded tongues to start wagging and Uma Wang has it. The designer, who emerged seemingly from the shadows this season with a near-visionary collection of directional knit pieces, many by hand, has even “seen-it-all” industry-insiders a little stunned – and a lot excited. She also has them fooled, as this is no newcomer to the fashion scene. Wang put in 10 years designing clothes for various Chinese labels before launching her own in 2005, and with a few key dots connected along the way, seems now on an unstoppable trajectory toward “overnight success” – 15 years in the making. One such “dot” that connected was when Anna Wintour, Vogue’s legendary editor in chief, met up with Wang during her visit to China last November. When arguably the most powerful woman in fashion comes knocking, you must be doing something right.
     Wang studied her craft at China Textile University in Shanghai, and London’s Central Saint Martins, respectively, but her real education came when an early employer sent her to “a knitting factory”, as she calls it, to learn the ins & outs of the knitwear trade through a rigorous, almost labor camp-like experience. When I ask her to elaborate, she reveals “I was living in the factory for a while. It wasn’t a very nice place and working long hours every day..”, but immediately follows the recollection with a statement of gratitude: “When I look back, this was one of the most important periods in my life and I treasure it.”