Astrid Andersen. Fall 2020 - London Fashion Week

Images from the designer and the public domain. Credited to the photographer/company where applicable: Vogue.com)

Since 2014, Astrid Andersen has been pushing on with her take of the glamorized 1990s street wear styles for London Fashion Week.  As all the Fashion Weeks begin to rev up in earnest, we're just peering into the new year, leaving behind a tumultuousness 2019, with all its outcries and confusion, which also includes the politicization of 'events' from both sides.  Fuelled by rapid news feeds via its digital feedback loops,  that could be setting into degrees of fatigue, to which 2020 may manifest a clarity; slow down, reflect and move on.  Whatever the year brings, Andersen, like other designers are trying to refocus onto a more unified time, drawing from a period in 20th Century history that seemingly brought people together.  These are the Utopian dreams of the late 1960s and early 70's, but in all sincerity the appeal of past era's has been immortalized aesthetically, but only as an nostalgic romanticism.

Andersen has drawn from the 'Poncho' late 60's flower power impressions, reportedly influenced by its floral print designs of a vintage couch her mother has back in the country of her birth, Denmark.  Yet the modern and very 21st Century styles of tough and rugged outwear has not been toned down. Since 2016, the mountaineering and military esque male styles gathered momentum on the runways, has in the last 5 years embraced fine tailoring and the more defined modernist cues.  Which in turn has influence some of the  current street wear collections.  Andersen, for Fall 2020, has reset it towards more of the durable outdoor styles in representing her brand's casual and formal attributes. 

She has never stopped using real fur in her collections, to which many advocators maintain that faux fur is unsustainable. Whatever the moral discord, there is an impracticality and antagonistic indulgence in using fur as men's outwear.  Ensuring that the costs of styling 'fur' for casual styles, to sell as an luxury item, may entail as lesser sales than not.  

For Astrid Anderson's Fall 2020, there are the sleek and defined street wear styles, tassel trimmings on Ponchos and some striking prints, as  the overall collection covers the modernist spectrum of 70's and 80's industrial color palette. The fusions of men's runway styles over the last 10 years is evident with her latest collection, narrowing it down into a focused perspective for her signature brand. Mostly synthetic materials with large doses of dyed furs, seen on vests to long overcoats.  The whole collection feels crisp and defined.