The pencil skirts and dresses and coats in Colleen Allen’s fall collection all show “a little bit of butt.”
In just a year, Allen has become one of New York Fashion Week’s breakout stars—and she’s done so without even doing a fashion show. It makes sense: Allen’s clothes, intimate and introspective, are better experienced up close. At an appointment, the designer spoke about how the tight turnaround between September and early February pushed her to design on instinct rather than concept. She also said that she started working on this collection as the 2024 election results started to come in: “I was just thinking, how do you deal with this?” She reflected.
Allen said she looked at the older women in her life to find “somebody with a level of wisdom from having lived through historical moments like these before.” What she learned was that embracing a spirit of irreverence was the way into channeling autonomy. Don’t mistake the austerity in Allen’s clothes—or the face value modesty in her fleeces and cottons—for a lack of rebelliousness. What has made this designer a spellbinding presence in the New York landscape is not that she makes beautiful clothes, which is true of those wispy, drapey sheaths and a beguilingly sexy velvet column gown with a smocked neckline—but she also distills a sense of carelessness and ease, of soulfulness, that is sorely missed in fashion today.
Allen is clearly having fun exploring the boundaries of her practice. She embroidered the shoulders of a black gown with sequins and stone-like beads—“I wanted to work with things I previously hated or I typically wouldn’t see in my world,” she said. Allen also resolved her curiosity for Victorian-era garments, explaining that her curiosity stems from the way dresses were tailored then. “I want to interpret these historical ways of tailoring for women in a way that’s not restrictive,” she said. The result showed her reverence for the female form, with paneled velvet and fleece jackets and coats with volume built into the hip. “You can let them fall or use the crinolines,” she said of a few charming, puffy loofa-like pieces that attach under each coat.
Allen’s clothes have often received the descriptor “witchy.” Here, she offered cute tees printed with the word “witch camp” on them: “Why not,” she laughed. Reclaiming was an underlying theme here: Besides a gorgeously nutritional celery color, Allen proposed a “divisive” purple, in her words, and a beautiful, glistening cerulean blue. This lookbook features the artist Kembra Pfahler. Allen recalled Pfahler’s famous layered imprints of her buttocks on canvas. “It was like a fuck you way of referencing Yves Klein and how he used to utilize the female body as a paint brush,” she said, contextualizing her choice of blue.
Going back to those glimpses of bum, Allen cut the vents in her suiting almost waist high and dragged the patterns in her suiting in spirals that bifurcated in the back to offer the same playful peekaboo effect. “I was thinking of that image of Vivienne Westwood meeting Queen Elizabeth II,” she said. Westwood, ever the rebel, was not wearing any knickers. The photo Allen speaks of is one of the late designer twirling and exposing her bare behind.
In the March issue of Vogue, Allen spoke to Nicole Phelps about being a female independent designer and founder today, and the lack of women holding top design roles in luxury fashion. “I hope there’s a generational shift as the world evolves,” she said, “and that if we just keep making the work, people will see it.” Stepping into her by-appointment presentation yesterday was like walking into New York’s hottest club. The city’s next-gen fashion cognoscenti—including a friend and fellow editor—all seem to agree that, in his words: “Colleen Allen is the real deal.”
