Into the 4th Dimension

Liam Hodges FW19
By Finn Blythe | Fashion | 6 January 2019
Photography Tomas Turpie

In an age where barely a week passes without news of some ill-advised franchise re-make or agonisingly contrived reunion, the currency of nostalgia is at an all-time high. New ideas are surrendered in favour of re-hashing tired concepts and originality is lost amid lucrative profits, but Liam Hodges has no intention of looking back on what is safe and pre-rehearsed, at least not without one eye on the horizon.

For FW19 he presented a collection resolutely fixed on future, a cyber-punk march to the 4th dimension studded with the aesthetic tropes of some not-too-distant post-Digital Age. From Y2K asymmetric graphics, to oversize skiwear produced in collaboration with Ellesse and shellsuit-esque tracksuits carrying the 2-D projection of a tesseract, this was ‘a new wave’, unafraid to get it wrong and unconcerned with what has worked in the past. Kaleidoscopic palettes, typical of Hodges’ playful ouevre, swirled over three-quarter length trousers and boiler suits, while milky contact lenses gave models the appearance of cyborgs – a nod perhaps to the impending future of biomechatronics that was later confirmed by prints of South Korean artist Lee Bul.

The show notes spoke of a collective mindset trapped between dimensions, a refusal to look back, wading through a netherzone of our own making. As the show reached its operatic finale, the message was clear: that in spite of the dizzying speed with which the world around us moves forward, the crisis we perceive as unfolding before us is, in fact, growing pains: a stomach-churning lurch into the unknown, in the face of which, we must fight the urge to look back.

GALLERYBackstage images from Liam Hodges FW19

GALLERYCatwalk images from Liam Hodges FW19





BACKSTAGE