admin “Bring lightness,” said Willie Norris at her studio for Outlier in Brooklyn. A hefty statement coming from a designer who, last season, presented a dusky collection that could have been considered gloomy had she not contextualized it in a galaxy far, far away and accessorized it with playful alien prosthetics.
For spring, Norris was back on Earth but still looking for an escape. “I’ve been thinking a lot about people in the city (New York) escaping over the summer, just wanting to leave,” said Norris. “Here I was trying to metabolize that feeling without going to a dark place.” This applied to her lineup both literally and figuratively. The collection was decisively lighter and brighter, and it had been designed around the idea of a sunny summer escapade. “They’re going to a destination wedding,” she said with a chuckle. Norris is a fixture of the queer artsy scene in New York, and there were also nods to summer life in Fire Island here.
The destination wedding of it all was primarily a storytelling device. The first few looks pictured what Norris described as “New Yorkers heading to the airport.” There were plaid garment bags and burly outerwear—the pieces were not only stiff but also stifling, painted over and over with black spray paint for dramatic effect—which progressively peeled off into breezier separates. This is where the novelty began and the lightness came into this lineup. Norris seldom works with this much color, let alone these many graphics. The prints in this section were all deftly dyed by an artist in North Carolina, and they were Norris’s way of imbuing some novelty in Outlier classics. Most striking was a shibori dyed “reptilian peacock” texture and a set of enchanting rainbow sunset-like cotton pieces, the latter of which was done by artist Kyle Meyer at his home on Fire Island.
A run of papery cotton shirting cut into boxers and elongated button downs were Norris’s lightest designs in the collection. A handful of pieces made with a summer-weight wool and nylon blend taffeta, particularly a sleeveless collared shirt with a single button closure, will likely conquer both Norris’s core Outlier demographic and her more dressed down queer peers. The injected linen suiting Norris introduced a few seasons back also returned with a playful update in the shape of sun-blasted prints sourced from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection.
The closing looks were mostly inspired by fish and the sultriness of existing by the beach. The fish-y prints and motifs were a playful triple-entendre: “I’ve been thinking about fish a lot: Number one, I love fishing. Number two, culturally, the term ‘fish’ is incredible (in reference to the way the word is used in queer spaces). Number three, I saw a headline that said ‘The Fish Are Cooking’ because of climate change,” said Norris.
A primary point of reference this season was “To Be Nobody Else” by photographer John Pearson—not the book or its content, but the phrase itself. Norris has found her groove over the past year, and that inner confidence radiates onto her clothes. This energy was felt the most in her final looks, a belt-skirt hybrid and a dress made of paracord and two “tops” shaped with sand directly on models’ bodies. “I’m going unflinchingly sexy, I want to make clothes you want to take off,” said Norris. What felt fresh here was that, with Norris, sex is more about a vibe than skimpiness and cutout knits. These were sexy clothes, sure, but some you’ll want to put back on.
