Dressing and Nothingness

VANITIES

Fashion’s cool new designers are just starting to get noticed

Perhaps the last few years of material extravagance—John Galliano’s Orient Express! Tom Ford’s Bond girls!—have left everyone partied out. Or maybe it has to do with all those empty 0’s in the year 2000. Whatever it is, fashion’s coolest crew-of-new is high-minded, intellectual. They’re filling those 0’s with thought.

So who are these Sartres of the seam? Ladies first. Half-Belgian, halfPortuguese, 26-year-old Veronique Branquinho graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy with a final presentation titled “The Decadence of Etiquette,” which sounds more like performance art than fashion. Inspired by movies such as Heavenly Creatures and Twin Peaks, Branquinho fixes on that moment when black holes start appearing in teen dreams. Her schoolgirl pleats— mathematical, implacable—suggest spiraling staircases in Goth towers.

Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf are the Siegfried and Roy of couture, only without the white tigers. They too have put arty titles on their collections (such as “The Appearance of the Void”), and they produced—and sold—a “virtual” perfume (there was nothing in the bottle). The actual clothes, however, the silhouettes, are amazing, balancing on a fine line between exquisite simplicity and cartoonish abandon. With Viktor & Rolf it’s nothing or everything.

Now 29, Hussein Chalayan, a Cypriot Turk, has had a cult following since his graduation in 1993 from Central Saint Martins College of Art. Speaking of his most recent collection under his own name (he also designs one for TSE New York), he told Vogue his idea was to “represent the invisible through form.” For Chalayan, the invisible is History, Gravity, Mutability—all of which we see in his exploration of ethnic silhouettes, in details so weighted they become shapes, so evolved they become objects.

As for the Spanish-born, self-taught, 34-year-old Miguel Adrover, he’s the star of the moment, having received ecstatic press—and the C.F.D.A.’s Perry Ellis Award for Women’s Wear—for clothes that fall somewhere between semiotics and home sewing. His latest collection included an Edwardian day coat in cotton ticking taken from the mattress of a neighbor, the late Quentin Crisp. Beautiful and sad, inventive and stained—what was the coat saying about values, about labels, about life? What does it all mean? This is the little question these designers are trying on for size.

LAURA JACOBS