Minimalism isn’t part of Johnson Hartig’s vocabulary, but monochrome is. The designer started showing solids in spring 2022 and he reports that they’re selling well. Why? “I think they fit beautifully. They’re so easy. They’re elongating. Everyone looks taller and slimmer in them, and it’s just a really easy, chic, complete outfit,” he said on a walk-through. “There’s a new Libertine person out there that’s getting used to Libertine without everything.” The new clothing tags have been given a bling-over, so these pieces aren’t wholly ascetic, and it’s likely that many customers are using the solids as a base to show off one of the brand’s more ornate toppers, which some people collect as they would art.
Hartig’s instinct to clean things up a bit—this is Libertine we’re talking about—is spot on. After five seasons of creating OTT lookbooks to present his collections it was time for a change. For fall, the line-up has been photographed against a white background on the designer’s friend, the super stylist B. Åkerlund, who, unlike the young models of past lookbooks, carries the clothes with a mature confidence; plus she’s probably more representative of the Libertine customer. Not that there’s an age limit on these clothes, in fact they are youthful in their joyfulness, but all the handwork that goes into them makes them investment pieces. The most elaborate item in the fall line-up is a neatly tailored jacket dense with layered floral embellishments that took two men 900 hours to decorate.
Libertine’s story has been told before, but it’s rooted in the DIY tradition and early collections featured vintage clothes that had been silk-screened or otherwise maximized. That model changed as stores asked for consistent sizing, which is hard to achieve when repurposing existing garments, and as the supply of “quality vintage” has dwindled or become prohibitively expensive. “When you think about it, the last 25 years has been Forever 21, just crap clothes, so there’s nothing out there. And also it seems like over the last 20 years, everyone’s kind of become either a vintage dealer or authority,” Hartig observes. No matter, he has basically created his own vintage pieces, by having artisans recreate crazy quilt fragments on some tailoring, and a series in pink and gold updating early ’60s silhouettes.
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