admin As a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist, Melitta Baumeister has eyes on her, and the spring season presented the opportunity to introduce her work to a broader audience. The designer smartly took advantage with a sort of stock-taking lineup, consisting of many familiar silhouettes.
Baumeister is a courageous creator of shapes, some of which are extreme: See look one, a snake-inspired dress made of padded tubes, and 15, a phallic-looking number which puzzles together horseshoe hoops with ball endings. (Regular-sized silver metal versions of these on T-shirts are a recent addition to the brand repertoire.) Bananas have been part of the brand iconography for years and one appears in bag form this season. (The fruit also showed up at Puppets and Puppets.) Newsier, and surprisingly cute, was an upside-down bow mini bag and platform shoes to go with it.
Iterations of the brand’s tent and upside-down tulip shapes were on offer for spring, as were her pleated fabrics and volumes, which get their structure from foam. Baumeister believes in the power of fashion to transform your day, your mood, your life, and she attempted to get that message through via a presentation and a video. “You might think Melitta Baumeister is purely a black and white brand. Perception is our most unreliable sense because it can be changed so easily. What you see is not always what you get. Can something so voluminous be easy to wear? Seems impossible yet here it is,” are some lines from the script.
Baumeister creates clothes that have a big impact, but most have their basis in good old American sportswear, it’s just that she’s added foam to the sleeves of a T-shirt dress, or super-sized a shirtwaist using the same technique. She’s been translating her volumes into drapey denim (and track suits) and was ahead of the JNCO revival moment we’re living through. Last season Baumeister introduced hand-painted jeans that have a touch of the feeling of Warhol’s screen-prints. They are stellar and, she says, have been a commercial success. The recent addition of sportier elements (see spring’s orange topper) helps balance the seeming fancifulness of the line.
Complementing the brand’s signature pleats is new parachute ruching that is interrupted by bands of sheer filament. Though Norma Kamali was not a reference, it recalled that designer’s popular parachute style. Like Cecilie Bahnsen, Baumeister has introduced jackets that take into account the volumes they need to cover. Wavy lines are part of the brand vocabulary, and this season they took on an additional form, a headless snake print created with the help of AI. It worked best applied to mesh layering pieces, creating a tattoo effect. Because Baumeister’s designs have an inherent graphic quality, the overlay of patterns on them is more distracting than enhancing, and has the potential to interfere with her goals. “What I really want is for people to understand the garments,” she said on a studio visit. If you can get past the snakes, it’s totally doable.
