Giovanna Flores’s fall collection began in an unlikely place—with mops. “I’ve worked with rope before and I’ve always thought these mops were pretty, so I was playing around with them on the mannequin,” she explained during a recent appointment at her Brooklyn apartment. Flores had taken to sometimes replacing the strip of fabric that keeps the mop vines together with different fabrics as she laid them flat to create textured embellishments on skirts or around the collars of cardigans, evoking a domestic take on a fur collar.
This small introduction of color reminded her of the 20 bolts of brightly printed silk fabric that she’d recently come across at one of her favorite shops upstate where the vibe usually skews more to quilting fabric. “If it was only one roll I probably wouldn’t have cared for it,” she recalled. “But all of them together were really cool.” The mix of paisleys, tile florals, tonal jacquards, stripes, and polka dots might sound chaotic, but brought together by Flores’s unique eye for form and shape it was a thing of beauty with a slight nod to the early collections of Dries Van Noten.
A halter pieced from five different printed silks and a kind of ribbed knit capelet that wrapped around the shoulders were among the highlights, as were a bright red fleece wrap sweater trimmed in denim fringe and the collaged knit pieces. “I love shrunken knits, and I thought it would be cool to collect them, you know people throw them in the wash and then they shrink,” she explained. “I wanted to add some texture.” A striped yellow long sleeve sweater was bisected by a slash of red and black; the lower half of a blue and white knit sweater seemed to be pulled from the bottom of a white long sleeve t-shirt.
The idea with clothes is that they come from nothing; you start with a mannequin that represents the naked human form and you build upon it, layer it, protect it. With Flores’s work, the sense is more that she’s sort of excavating and investigating; each swatch of fabric and each pattern piece come from something and end up somewhere else, the only natural conclusion of a particular sweater or dress or skirt. “I don’t see my work as quirky at all,” she said. “I just want to make beautiful stuff that makes people feel good.” Flores has been selling her clothes on Instagram and through her website, and holding a handful of IRL shopping events at her studio. “The response has been really great,” she said. Not surprisingly, Chloë Sevigny has already hit the red carpet in one of her dresses.
