With no end date in sight for working from home, my most recent shopping searches have focused on antique French quilts and embroidered pillow cases. It could be a sign that I’m going a bit stir-crazy, and looking at the spring 2021 collections I get the feeling that I’m not alone.
Travel restrictions made the production of these garments an exercise in ingenuity. If some designers went back into their archives and storerooms for patterns and materials, others looked no further than their own four walls. How else to explain the many references to interior design, from draping techniques that seemed borrowed from windows to striped toweling that could’ve been lifted from a kitchen drawer.
Bedroom vibes, rather than eyes, were highlighted in the pillowy and padded collections of emerging talents Caroline Hu, Jordan Dalah, and Beautiful People’s Hidenori Kumakiri, while at Fendi Karl Lagerfeld’s penchant for bed linen was referenced, and Land of Nod looks with details like embroidery and laddering were reimagined for the light of day.
The message of spring’s homebound collections might just be that windows of opportunity are literally all around us.