Designer Neil Grotzinger—like many fashion people—was busy enjoying a Euro summer over the last few months. But if you think he spent his weeks abroad sipping wine and sitting at the beach, think again: Grotzinger spent much of his free time thrifting and sourcing vintage instead. It makes sense: His recent collections have focused on up-cycling the retro clothes that he finds along his travels.
Last season, Grotzinger embraced this mood by turning vintage suits into something much more flamboyant—but for spring, he shifted his lens onto dresses, sourcing sweet (and somewhat dowdy) frocks from the 1950s or 1960s, then cutting them up and bedazzling them for a new extreme spirit. “Every season I try to come up with a contradiction, and for this collection, it was nostalgia and desecration,” said Grotzinger. “Nostalgia is all about preserving memories, but I thought about ‘ruining’ things or not caring about their traditional value.”
You could see that approach in the sweet, buttoned-up day dresses that he spliced and turned into saucier two-piece sets. In some instances, his heavy use of multicolor crystals—he loves a rhinestone—followed the pinstriping of the original garments he up-cycled; other times, he went wild with his embellishments, adding them in vine-like arrangements across the whole piece. This worked best when he kept the silhouettes simple: One of his long, below-the-knee up-cycled dresses was left untouched, the simple column shape lending itself perfectly to his raucous crystals. “It forced me to have a little bit more of a tender hand, with something that I’m usually more obnoxious with,” he said.
The designer took things even further, meanwhile, with a spliced-up wedding gown that he transformed into two different statement skirts—one cut on an asymmetric bias. Originally, they were dainty and fragile in simple white lace, but Grotzinger added shimmer and hefty jewel bobbles along the edges—transforming them into the fashion equivalent of wearable chandeliers. They’re the extreme opposite of what a traditional bride would wear down the aisle—right down to the hot-fixed, layered tank tops he paired with them. Such experimentations were deliberately unpolished and a whole lot scrappy, but they did serve as a reminder of what fun fashion can be: Must everything be so serious?
