“It just feels like summer in a really nice, wholesome, sweet way. I felt that energy a lot in these pieces,” said Giovanna Flores of her unconstrained and dreamy spring collection. Summer is more than a season, it is also a state of mind equated with freedom, light, openness, and adventure—all qualities that animate this designer’s off-beat work.
A California transplant, Flores has been consulting for brands while doing her own thing in Brooklyn since 2015, having launched her own line with her Pratt graduation collection. She unexpectedly became fashion’s indie It Girl this year after Chloë Sevigny (a long time supporter), Ayo Edebiri, and Greta Lee stepped out in her one-of-a-kind crafty looks, which communicate an unexpected kind of glamour and assert the individuality of the wearer. Asked to explain the appeal of her work Flores replied: “It’s hard for me to say, but I try to keep this rawness about everything where it does feel like a balance in tension in things. And I think sometimes the phases between draping, patterns, muslin, final fabric, every step dilutes something, so every phase sort of tones the final outcome down a bit. And also this is my situation right now: I do everything. I source everything. I have an assistant help here and there, but most people have people for different steps. You see one person’s hand and I think that must show.” It does, and at a time when there is an appetite for things analog as opposed to algorithmic.
Flores’s freeform garments, which seem to document the flow state of her creativity, can feel as if they are in a state of becoming, a positive attribute. They carry with them a sense of possibility. Non-standard sizes allow the wearer to adjust them as they want; some pieces can be worn front-to back. This designer builds her garments through deconstruction and collage. The most dramatic example of the latter was a long dress in the primary colors Ellsworth Kelly loved (red, green, blue) with romantic white sleeves and a draped, almost bustled low back. In this pick-and-mix collection, it functioned like an eye-opening sour candy. Its opposite was a “skeleton” dress made of different styles of slips made of over-locked tulle in different, transparent colors. Continuing this idea of color bleeds, a T-shirt was emboldened with stuffed shoulder pads that let the filling color “seep” through.
In Flores’s hands things that really shouldn’t work somehow do. Take a dress with a shiny, even gaudy, metallic pink stretch front and cotton back in shades of magenta (there was a lot of back action for spring). “I think it’s a mix of some of the stuff that I would think was the tackiest things ever, ” she said of the collection. “ I don’t know why lately that’s what I’m drawn to, it’s like a challenge.” Flores’s work is evidence that limitations can bolster creativity. Her main hurdle is finding ways to work with found materials. For spring she used lawn chair webbing for structure and decoration. Flores battled with this material until she discovered its secret —it can only be sewn on in straight lines. “That’s sort of where I started with this season, just thinking about these colors and lines sort of piling on top. I was looking at these very straight shapes,” Flores noted.
An embellished black leather jacket and a floaty blouse featured embroidery done with chunky ’80s-style colored “gems.” There was a touch of romance in fishnets with crochet details, and in a “falling lace situation” devised from triangular fabric scraps sewn together. A pair of jeans and a denim skirt were spliced open so that trailing inserts of colorful materials could be inserted. There was something carnivalesque about those pieces, a vibe that was in harmony with the sunny joyfulness and sense of play that permeated the collection.
