At Cristina Grajales Gallery, Ashlynn Park presented a collection among design objects she had curated from the gallery’s collection. This juxtaposition of old and new objects paralleled the designer’s overall process for spring 2025, which began, she said, “with revisiting the history of fashion.” Her icons are Madame Grès, Christian Dior, Azzedine Alaïa (whose collection Park visited recently), and Yohji Yamamoto (with whom Park once worked). Their work, she explained, “always gives a right and clear answer when I face a challenge. I feel like we have so many challenges and we constantly look to the future, but the answers and the solutions are often already there [in the past].”
Since she launched her line, Park’s work has often been compared to that of Yamamoto (who has himself taken fashion history as a theme), and that will likely be the reaction to Park’s take on the tuxedo, a one-button mid-length black coat with a bit of an hourglass shape that’s an explosion black and white at the back as the shirt and coat back dance together. Park is familiar with the famous bustle backed coat that was recently exhibited in Milan, but it was seeing how meticulously Alaïa had engineered a shirt and jacket that inspired her smoking look.
Park spent a month and a half getting the tension right in a black, draped Grecian gown a la Grès in jersey with a rolled detail at the waist. (Another version, in red, was nicely styled over a simple long-sleeved top.) Like a trim eel-skin tunic and an asymmetric leather corset top, these gowns made use of the designer’s puzzle-piece technique.
Television show or no, Christian Dior is a constant reference for Park. Her take on the iconic Bar jacket jettisoned the padded hips; rather the hip panniers floated on a cloud of tulle and exposed boning that topped a long, draped skirt. This was a take-the-stuffing-out-of-things moment. Under the jacket was a simple bra. Similar in silhouette, but not construction, was a white sleeveless dress with a romantic peplum made using a no-waste technique in which squares of material are connected.
The looks in the second room stood like the Erechtheion’s Porch of the Maidens caryatids at the Acropolis. It was easy to imagine Chessy Rayner or Mica Ertegun gravitating to a black column dress with a Fontana-like slash of white. The combination of new, more evening-focused designs with more familiar, and in the case of a kilt and a shirtdress, casual looks, was discordant, regardless of the appeal of the individual pieces.
Park’s exploration of past fashion included her own back catalog, specifically spring 2023, which featured a performance by the dancer and choreographer Yin Yue. This season’s take on the past work was a jersey jumpsuit with a slightly-low, V-shaped yoke and draped harem-style pants. It was styled with a bandeau-like cardigan that revealed a sliver of skin at the shoulder. There was something rather Martha Graham about this look; at the same time, it was of the moment, as a similar silhouette, derived from different sources was seen at Alaïa by Pieter Mulier and at Norma Kamali. The idea of softly gathered material that accommodates movement is related, more broadly, to freedom.
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