ALECTRA ROTHSCHILD'S MASCULINA SS27 SHOW WAS FOR THE DOLLS
Alectra Rothschild's 'Doll Parts' took place in a flooded Copenhagen cistern and turned the machinery of femininity into the collection itself. Asthetik Magazine was there to experience it firsthand.
Cisternerne was never meant to hold a fashion show. It is a subterranean reservoir beneath Søndermarken, excavated from 1856 to keep Copenhagen in drinking water, taken out of service and drained by 1981, and left long enough to become the only dripstone cave in Denmark. Water still finds its way through the ceiling. The floor holds it in shallow black pools. Fog gathers between the brick arches and does not lift. Alectra Rothschild looked at all of that and saw a runway.
What she made in it was the show people were still talking about on the last day of the week. The light was amber and gave up almost nothing beyond a few metres. The music was loud enough to take conversation off the table. The models did not walk so much as appear, moving quickly through the vapour with their own reflections travelling beneath them in the standing water, and the first of them came forward barefoot in a tiered gown of cream ruffles over a fringed underskirt in tortoiseshell, a baseball cap pulled down, passing a single microphone stand left in the middle of the room.
Rothschild put the collection's thesis in the show notes, and it is the clearest artist's statement anyone offered all week. "The corset that cinches the waist. The tape that tucks away down there. The inflation that exaggerates our curves. The doll parts."
Everything came out of those four lines. A beaded mini worn with long black opera gloves and thigh-highs, catching what little light there was. A gold latex dress moulded hard to the torso and cut away at the hip, a froth of black tulle beneath it, the model turning back over her shoulder with one hand at her chest. A black ruffled coat left open over a latex brief and a chain-link belt, tall boots, a tartan cap worn backwards, the whole thing held in a stance that dared the room to look away. Bugle bead embroidery, lace, denim fishnet and fringe ran through the collection alongside the corsetry. These are the devices that make a body legible as feminine, and Rothschild knows them from the inside. Here she made them the material and the argument at the same time.
Masculina describes itself as a humanwear label. The name sets feminina and masculino around an anarchist A, and the brand's published position leaves nothing to interpret: "what and who gets to represent femininity is very shallow and orthodox," it says, and "there are a lot more people behind these terms than previously allowed." FKA twigs, Arca and Eartheater have all worn the clothes.
The clue really is in the title, and the joy of the show was watching Rothschild take a phrase as loaded as doll parts and hand it back with all the glamour intact. The label is being onboarded to Copenhagen Fashion Week's Sustainability Requirements for SS27, with committee screening ahead of AW27. Whatever comes of that, the week now knows it has a designer who can fill a nineteenth-century water tank with fog and hold every person standing in it.
