Cult Gaia - Resort 2023
Cult Gaia, with the name that says it all and in light of my Fall 2022 review of the brand, creative director Jasmin Larian Hekmat maintains her love affair with the 1960's and mid 1970's modernist fashion. And I have to admire Hekmat's passion towards these bygone eras that were in hindsight very significant milestones of the mid to late 20th Century. The beginning of the space age, computer chip, nuclear power and youth countercultures from the U.K 'mods', which brought clean cut modernist styles to its forte, onto cultish aspects of the hippie and pre hedonisms of disco and nightclubs. Even though these countercultures set the stage for the decades that followed, they have since petered out into a simulacrum of 21st Century digital market places. The 60's and 70's did indeed set the precedence of sexual liberation, women's reproductive rights and artistic creativity to new highs.
Although Hekmat is recopying the said trends and I mean this in the most respectful way, she has been able to instill an interesting take on the space-age aesthetic to which fashion designers of that period like Mary Quant, André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin had already defined the template for 1960's futurist looks. Yet, it is refreshing to see Hekmat reinstate that allure of 60's and 70's lasciviousness, under her brand Cult Gaia by reflecting an aesthetical homage, in all of its necessity the sexual empowerment of the feminine.
In similarity to the Fall collection, Hekmat has chosen the stark aspects of natural landscapes as her backdrop for the Resort lookbook, further adding melodrama to the Cult Gaia presentation, cut into the lookbook are static studio shots, which relays an overall science fiction themed concept. What comes to mind are the '2001: Space Odyssey' monoliths, albeit colored throughout the shoot with a 70's esque surreality of maybe this is all but a computer simulation. Inclusively the collection does hold a rebellious modernist tinge, with attempts at Hekmat breaking into the more experimental styles, notably the see-through knotted tubular clad dress and the burnt orange textured top with matching pants.
Cult Gaia latest collection offers a sexy, fresh and enticing reverence to a future that never was and a past that could have been.
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A.Glass 2022
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