It’s been a rollercoaster year for Heirlome’s Stephanie Suberville, who last month was named a runner-up of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. With the win behind her and the pressure off, the designer approached her pre-fall offering with a light heart and a colorful palette. “My mindset was very free,” she said. “I design a lot for myself and what I would wear, [the process] is very intuitive and I was definitely thinking . . . ‘Oh, I want this and I want that and I want that.’ ”
In place of a red thread running through the collection there were red dresses. One was knitted from bias-cut strips of fabric; the other, in supple silk, was cut without a shoulder seam so that the fabric draped against the body. The two streamers suspended from the waist can be left to hang free or tied at the hip, creating a diagonal across the body. Also side gathered was an ivory skirt which Suberville draped on herself over pants; the suspended waistband elegantly translates that moment of creation.
The designer’s hand was most evident in jerseys that were pulled and twisted into knots. Similarly dimensional were the knits. These pieces verged on the trippy because they were inspired by the unique art made for the brand by Arnulfo Vazquez Rodriguez, an award-winning artisan based in Jalisco. “He told me, ‘I’m going to surprise you,’” recounted Suberville, “and he did something totally unexpected; it’s very abstract, psychedelic. And I was so happy when I saw it because it’s so different from what we were doing last season that it really put me in this very different head space.” A groovy one at that.
