Raquel Allegra - Resort 2021

  (Images from Raquel Allegra.  All rights. Used in promotion of the designer.)



The Covid-19 fashion lookbooks are showing the change that fashion as an industry is about to embank on, which like most trade related industries of goods and the aesthetics of selling.  Are trying to adjust towards a crisis that is this viral pandemic, which shows no signs of abating until a vaccine is sourced.  Which, according to medical trials underway may not be available until late 2021.  It is the greatest unknown that humanity has faced in over a 100 years and we're not coping too well.  Understandable, as discord and fear mounts throughout the populous, it has happened before in history, these plagues and pandemics create so much turmoil.  As a society, we didn't think it would occur again.  Maybe we just became to overconfident, to reliant on the digital landscape as a guide for our hopes and dreams and the wake up call from hell has arrived.

Emerging designers such as Raquel Allegra are reflecting a humanity that has been thrown into disray by a micro entity, with an introspective and open approach to her Resort 2021 collection.  Offering the practicable and defined, Allegra has set an array together under lock down and quarantine showcasing aspects of what could be considered our moods, the perception of color and the diffusing of color, interconnected to the psyche.  However the dichotomy of what materialistically makes one feel good, to the idealism of its aesthetics, it is the spectrum of colors with dual opposites of white and black that prescribe a modality, crafted uniquely as a human trait.  We create and specify colors, nature doesn't, it's how the mind interprets them as an inspiration.  Both dark and light hold an emotive presence that cannot be dismissed. What one must confront within the dark, should also see and face in the light.  To endure.

In achieving this the Los Angeles designer has maintained her dye tie fixture, yet molding it around, despite her relaxed criterion, a slightly conservative projection.  There is a seriousness to the styles on show, mirroring the turmoil that surrounds, fleece, fine cottons and wool are the materials of choice under quarantined restriction, layered onto the model, with Allegra's distinctive pattern work, moving from the psychedelic to the sombre.  Also noted are the designed face masks which are seen on every lookbook shot. Since human beings have a infinite capacity to politicize and distract themselves from reality, the reality will be, is that we will all be wearing masks in the shadow of the virus.  Not as some political feel good we-are-doing-the-right-thing token appeal, but as necessity to not spread this virus.