As we filed into the airy, wood-panelled room at The Standard, a lithe young girl wearing a haltertop from Eckhaus Latta's fall '14 and an official-looking badge was on her hands and knees strewing leaves of Napa Cabbage across a pastel runway. “Is this part of the show?” someone whispered behind me, “Has it started?” It hadn’t, but that’s the beauty of Eckhaus Latta and their multidisciplinary presentations. They mire their already enigmatic collections in an elusive, greater artistic narrative. It’s brilliant and beautiful and confusing as hell.
Soundtracked by a children’s choir underlined by a hollow, simplistic drum rhythm, the setting’s eccentricities belied a fairly standard runway presentation. A mix of models and regular people of all ages, who are so beautiful they look like models anyway, strode up and down, acting out Eckhaus Latta’s statements on sex and ruin. The crisp folds of blue denims and deceptively simple white tops that opened the show soon gave way to a kind of degraded earthiness. Rust-hued garments in various degrees of decay clutched at the bodies walking past us. Eckhaus Latta called the show “their sexiest yet,” and it was certainly the most revealing; I had a brief instinct to cover the eyes of the children’s choir. The conventional portion of the show ended when the models filed back onto the runway, grouped themselves by their garment’s colors and textures and fell repeatedly into each other. The dance, choreographed by Elle Erdman, evoked sex and shelter and had a kind of sadness: like survivors coming together after the apocalypse. As the choir stopped and we began to file out, a young boy jumped on the platform and began breakdancing on the lettuce. Somebody took a picture. I heard someone else ask, “Is this part of it?”