Backstage at the Grace Ling show and I’m looking for Grace Ling the designer so we can chat about her new collection, entitled ‘Future Relics,’ that we’re about to see. I spy plenty of other faces I know—Evanie Frausto on hair, Diane Kendal on make-up, and forever icon Ms. Patti Wilson busy working her styling magic, but no Ling. Then I find her, crouching down beside model Debra Shaw. Looking ineffably cool in her own garb (an oversized striped blazer and slouchy jeans), Shaw is about to be transformed into the show’s opening downtown valkyrie look: A 3D-printed platinum metallic top in the shape of a lethally exotic petal, and a brown satin skirt with a slithery languidity to it, which trails in her wake.
There’s the usual backstage melee vibe going on here, but there’s also something else, something enhanced by the heavy hitters busy working—and I’m thinking about the cast too, which includes Ugbad Abdi, Ashley Graham, Quannah Chasinghorse, and Precious Lee—the sense that a buzz is brewing. Ling, a 2023 Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund alum, has quickly garnered a following for her experimental way with technology and the frisson of sexiness with which she imbues it. Yet it’s a vibe mined from today’s world, with a body-inclusive, gender identity-inclusive way of thinking; the sharp edges of her clothes, literally and metaphorically softened yet also strengthened.
Her new collection, she says, works with dualities. “Future Relics comes from this idea of something very, very ancient combined with something that is very modern and futuristic,” Ling says. “How whatever we’re making today will be studied and viewed decades and centuries from now.” Translated into the clothes, that means for every strong-shouldered, waist-tapered jacket, in satin or leather, piercing-like accoutrements glinting in the show’s half-light, there is drapier, lighter fare, like a black devoré shirt with matching pants, the fading, disappearing lines of the devoré what Ling calls vestiges of the past. For every second-skin molded jersey dress, cutaways scissored to within an inch of their lives, there’s a white gossamer-light tee and skirt whose hems look like they’ve been burnt away to blackness.
Accessorizing all this are 3D-printed roses to be clutched in the hands, viciously pointy black leather ankle boots, or one of Ling’s new bags, a rectilinear pouch whose handle is like a paper dagger, the kind of thing that was used to open letters in the olden days—you know, like, in 1986. Here the dagger looks as if it has been mounted onto two small plinths. “It’s like when you see a sword in a museum, the way it rests in a holder when it’s being displayed,” she says. It turns out Ling has a thing for antiquities; she collects them, most recently a Chinese buckle in the shape of a duck dating from the Qing dynasty, and some very old crow’s feet in brass. (I too have old crow’s feet, except mine are around my eyes.) It turns out her collecting is also a fuel for her work. “It’s about the intricacies of the pieces, and how they were made in the past,” she says. “People will say, ‘Oh you can’t make things that way anymore.’ But I’m like: ‘We can try.’”
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