Alyx is a New York brand in the most essential sense. While at the moment designer Matthew Williams and his wife Jenn are based in Italy to be nearer to their production, their adopted home of New York City is never far from mind. The label has come to embody in just a five seasons a lot of the best things about the city: its nocturnal leanings; its rich subcultural histories; its eclecticism; and its hard-edged, ineffable cool.
Fall’s Natural Order gave way here to a collection Williams dubbed Love Chaos, a tribute to the disorder of New York. One graphic tee carried the image of the Twin Towers while another had text that, when folded horizontally, transformed from New York into Love. Yep, despite the fact that we’re just a few weeks past the Chelsea bombing and, as Williams noted, “all is not well” in the world, the takeaway here felt plenty optimistic. (By contrast, another recent Alyx shirt reading Natural Order became Fuck You.) “There’s not statement to be made,” Williams said of the current collection. “It’s just a reflection of how I feel.”
Williams’s instinctual approach to design rarely leads him astray. The Alyx pendulum swings easily between the feminine and the boyish (not unlike the killer personal style of his wife, maybe the label’s quintessential muse). Recent collections have embraced increasingly more femme-y touches. For Spring, alongside heavy, ultra-performance oriented jackets in collaboration with Italian moto brand Spidi—a story carried over from Resort—were crisp black poplin skirts and whisper-light plissé pants which cinched with a strap at the ankle. Alyx’s singular take on tailoring continues to be a highlight; take this season’s sharp zip-front twill vest, paneled with checkerboard stretch at the waist.
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