POV: New York Fashion Week is over when we say it’s over.
New York Fashion Week may have come and gone, but obviously we’re still talking about it. One of the best things about the seven day celebration is the opportunity to see talented designers who are truly challenging what’s possible. Especially in relation to fashion and climate change.
And that’s exactly what happened at PETER DO’s Spring ‘23 Ready To Wear Show. The LVMH prize winner teamed up with material innovation champion TômTex for his latest collection. It features the first ever pieces made from the company’s trademarked fabric.
The luxurious, leather-like textile, crafted from the remnants of shrimp shells and mushrooms, made its global debut in the form of ultra sleek monochrome top and trousers pairings, evoking a street style meets biker chic – but make it ethical –vibe. The success of the show marks a significant moment in the move towards circular design systems for high-end fashion, and we’re so psyched to be here for it.
The collaboration makes sense. Do’s namesake label is sort of a fashion collective, launched in 2018 by the designer alongside a group of long-time friends with a broad range of skill sets. The result is a young, innovative brand challenging the traditional structures of the industry, and putting sustainability first. The philosophy behind the designs make PETER DO the perfect partner for TômTex Co. – as per the textile trailblazer’s founder / CEO Chloe Uyen Tran, both “share common values of craftsmanship, quality, innovation and community.”
In fact, this isn’t the first time the two Vietnamese-born creators have worked together. Chloe worked as a freelance designer for the brand in its early days, before getting her MFA in textile design at Parsons. Drawing on experiences of her childhood in Da Nang (what she calls the epicenter of textile waste), she came out of her studies with a fascination for bio-materials and their role in the future of fashion. She credits Do for “profoundly impacting [her] view of the material world”, nodding especially towards the brand’s prioritization of community in the making process.
Honest textiles are a foundational pillar of PETER DO’s approach to design, and clearly the ethos influenced Tran when she founded TômTex Co. The latter’s high performance fabric is 100% biodegradable, and on the style side, both pleasing and versatile. The material is suitable for footwear, handbags, accessories, furniture, sports equipment, and as we saw this month, high-performance, beautiful clothes.
When we caught up with Chloe in early 2022, her company was still in the R&D stage of its manufacturing process, but she described her ideal partnership as one “with a brand that bakes sustainability and social issues into its business, which can actually motivate people to buy greener, more sustainable products.” The silhouettes TômTexTM material brought to the runway this month suggest that she found just the match she was looking for.
The biggest challenge we face in the move towards sustainable fashion is this weird misconception that somehow, by being more responsible in our fashion choices, we’re giving something up. That by using natural materials, we’re sacrificing the aesthetic quality of our clothes. That vegan leather will never look or feel like real leather, that regenerated fabrics don’t carry the same sharpness as virgin ones. To doubters of material innovation, we say, look at the PETER DO collection. The clothes are proof of luxury fashion’s compatibility with cleaner production methods, and that the choice to do fashion with the planet’s well-being at the forefront is, well, only natural.
-steph lawson
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