September 5, 2008

Robert Geller thrives on dislocation: shows that start late, darkly atmospheric settings (though Issei Suma’s Constructivist rope sculpture couldn’t match Fall’s crepuscular synagogue on the Lower East Side)…and exquisitely doom-laden soundtracks. Death in June’s marriage of acoustic guitar and leaden electronics was an appropriate complement to the concept Geller claimed as his inspiration this season: men in Eastern Europe, hanging tough to survive, finding it hard to show their sensitive side. Whoa! It was scarcely the boys of contemporary Bucharest or Budapest who came through in his collection. Instead, Geller offered up a vision that could have been extracted from a dark Transylvanian romance (okay, that’s still Eastern Europe, but not as we know it, Jim). Limpid-eyed, corpse-hued models with slicked-back hair—lost boys, actually—wore clothes with a formality that smacked of the night: shawl-collared jackets, tuxedo vests, pants with piped pockets, dark, silky things. The designer clearly has a thing for Tsarist militarist—here, there was a tasty leather jacket he called “Cossack.” He insisted that the stripes that dominated the collection were inspired by gypsies, but they also reminded one of prison uniforms. And after all, weren’t gypsies imprisoned en masse, which unfortunately cycled round to the accusations of Nazism once leveled at Death in June? That’s how easy it is to trip yourself up in the glass bubble of fashion. More advisable to latch onto the notion that Geller might actually have been making a prescient comment on the prison that masculinity can become for men ensnared by their gender. Oh, and the clothes were actually really beautiful.

— Tim Blanks