The cult of personality… It delivers dramas and looks, and it has done through the ages. Hollywood has a lot to do with it, of course, and the recent Elvis and Marilyn Monroe movies seem to have sparked a desire for throwback glamour. That’s how Ann-Sofie Johansson sees it. The H&M Studio collection she designed for spring 2023 responds to that with a collection illuminated by the star wattage of Grammy-winning artist Kali Uchis.
The offering is much broader than what is depicted in the lookbook, and includes a keeper of a leather jacket (with a whiff of Brando) in distressed brown leather to pair with jeans or one of the tulle ball skirts in the lineup. Greta Garbo wore a trenchcoat to pass under the radar, and Uchi wears H&M Studio’s update, featuring exaggerated shoulders and an outsized collar. The black set the singer sports elsewhere is embroidered with shiny buttons made from post-consumer recycled plastic sorted in Bengaluru, India, as part of an initiative the H&M Group has with the social enterprise Hasiru Dala Innovations.
A trompe l’oeil drapery print puts some fun into tailoring while pulling back the curtain on some of the underlying themes of the collection, such as person-versus-persona and real-versus-fake, which the team translated into on- and off-duty looks. The challenge, Johansson explains, is to “make really spectacular dresses and skirts, but also to keep it real, but still looking like a million dollars.”
This being an H&M collection, nothing will approach the seven figure range. The Studio collection might be relatively “accessible” but it’s not meant to be throw-away. If you break it down, the pieces are mostly wardrobe staples, with a few surprises, like vaguely Blond Ambition-style lingerie tops. The direction Johansson sees fashion moving is away from things being constantly new. “I mean, we are not finished with things. We’re not ready to leave things before they are supposed to be gone. So that is why I think we need to continue with certain things.” She’s talking about fashion (garments), but she could just as well be talking about the swell of nostalgia, for everything from Marilyn to Y2K, that keeps fashion fastened to what has been. The casting of Uchis helps bring a new perspective to a familiar theme.
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