Bites from the Big Apple: New York's 1970s love affair lives on

Gender blending, flamboyant suiting and photo-realism Sarah Kennedy reveals the latest trends from the city that never sleeps.

Borrowing from the girls

Don’t call it androgyny but do loosen up a bit, is the message from New York fashion stalwart Norma Kamali. “I dressed the New York Dolls in the 1970s,” Kamali told me during New York Fashion Week last month. “They used to come into my store and dress up in everything. I was selling big, full sleeved shirts to Robert Plant, and T shirts to Alice Cooper. This moment in time feels similar to back then.”  

The designer’s SS19 womenswear collection was photographed on a heterosexual couple, but with looks interchangeable between men and women. “Our male model walks like a boy, he’s very masculine but the women's clothes he is wearing are easy care, wrinkle free and basically fit anyone. I don’t do androgyny, this is womenswear but, for anyone who wants to wear it.”

Kamali did not consciously set out to trigger the gender blender conversation with her latest looks but the designer believes fashion is finally picking up where the New York Dolls era left off, with a new flamboyance. “It ended abruptly with AIDS.  The look we had going then never had a chance to properly evolve but now, Generation Z is embracing it. To them, it’s natural for men and women to be wearing each other’s clothes. And that is so healthy for the fashion industry.”

While Kamali is known for her 1940s-style, super-flattering swimsuits, there is one other item worth sharing. The designer's OTT sleeping bag coats are her winter signature; lightweight but luxurious and cozy as hell. What better way to radiate New York winter glam on any human.

Photo quality

The Swiss Institute Gallery on the corner of 2nd and St. Mark’s Place offers an opportunity to saunter down to the always-edgy East Village. The area is a fitting - albeit temporary - NYC home for an iconic exhibition, ‘Polyfocal Allover’ by Swiss artist Franz Gertsch. For the first time in decades, major works from the artist’s series of ‘situation portraits’ from the 1970s are being reunited.

"The Swiss Institute is honored to share these works with new audiences,” Simon Castets, director of the SI said. “The exquisitely rendered details and photographic vision are uncannily precise and vivid, with their unique and exacting rendering of the camera's flash.”

Viewing the stunning detail, colour and vibrancy of the acrylic painting ‘At Luciano’s House, 1973’ , it's easy to see why it's often mistaken for a modern fashion photograph. The fluid moment in time represented by the young, urban sitters in the painting  feels so contemporary. Castets agrees. “It's exciting as the content of the works themselves are an especially prescient representation of experimentation with gender codes and self-fashioning," he said.

Suits youth

Men's suiting is returning to the flamboyance of the 1970s in a new way according to designers Aleks Musika and Davidson Petit-Frere (featured in Forbes '30 Under 30' list this year) who dress all the young billionaire dudes from their New York atelier Musika Frere.

“There is always a focus on a perfect fit, which can often seem like we cut the suit sharply to the body, like with a knife,” Petit-Frere says. “Fabrics and colors are key to the personalities and moods of our clients." 

The city and the people the Musika Frere duo encounter drive their work. “Creating here requires you to work at a lighting speed - there's a distinctive energy that nowhere else can compare to” Petit-Frere adds. At their atelier on West 37th Street, clients (the likes of Jay-Z, Zachary Levi, Nick Jonas and Kevin Hart) can expect a traditional tailoring experience combined with the latest trends.

And there's no sign that the suit is falling out of favour, either. “The new power players in culture, tech, athletics, creative, entertainment, business, or anything else still seek out that certain power of having a great suit,” says Petit-Frere. Which is just as well.

West appeal

Grand, retro but totally modern too is a description that best suits interiors mogul John Derian who has just expanded his empire into four downtown stores.

The brand’s home goods bring colours and imagery from the past back to life in the form of decoupage – the cutting out and re-assembling of antique prints into decoration - on china, glassware and fabrics. New to Mr Derian’s stable is John Derian West; a gloriously shoppable selection of the brand’s most wanted pieces - glassware trinkets, dishes and more. 

Step into the exotic back parlour of the Christopher Street store for piled up, sumptuous velvet throws and antique rugs, then peep out of the rear window onto a secret courtyard that feels more like a slice of New Orleans than New York. The stop for NYC’s top interior designers seeking that final eclectic touch for an uptown client and locals craving a colour fix.

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