Neil Grotzinger’s work at NIHL is intrinsically queer in both narrative and sensibility, grounded in queer nightlife and its characters and subcultural cachet. Like its source of inspiration, NIHL is esoteric and hyper-specific; it paints an aesthetic picture of a lifestyle and array of characters often invisible to the mainstream, heteronormative eye.
It’s no surprise, then, that Grotzinger’s take on the Y2K craze that has taken over fashion the past couple of seasons feels niche. The designer initially found inspiration in the strange technological objects that populated their childhood: clear Lucite MacBooks, Game Boys, phones, and more. This manifested itself as a series of experiments with transparency and layering. Most successful were body-con pants and tops made out of multiple layers of sheer mesh with contrast stitching exposing the architecture of the garment, similar to how those Lucite surfaces exposed the inner workings of the objects they housed. Grotzinger is at their best where they ground their visual storytelling in their skillful eye for construction. There was an element of nostalgic futurism to this collection.
In a similar vein, he leaned into the deliberately tacky motifs of space-age imagery from the early 2000s to produce a group of pieces in reflective ripstop nylon. In pairing these pieces with on-trend items like cutout bodysuits, they exposed the fact that the future never ends up looking like you think it will. Elsewhere they put together an intricately embellished slip and a plaid button-down covered in so much black stitching it had a cardboard-like consistency, designed that way to feel as if it were disintegrating with the passing of time. (Before starting NIHL, Grotzinger was a textile and embroidery designer for different brands; this informs their sensibility.)
“What were the posters on my wall? Who were the people I was inspired by?” These were the questions Grotzinger was asking. “I was very much trying to create parallels between Paris and Nicky Hilton, these very girly socialite girls, and the very masc personas of the time,” they explained, pointing to a distressed white ribbed tank top covered in beading. In finding the links between the binary ends of the über-sexualized personas of the 2000s—Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, say—Grotzinger captured the sexualized energy of queer nightlife characters, both femme and masculine, dainty and brawny in equal measure.
By uncovering these time capsules and reimagining them through a queer lens, Grotzinger was able to take familiar items from back then and propose a vision of what they would actually look like had they been in rotation all this time, i.e., ended up in the future we once imagined. Items from our childhood stay embedded in our mind, and rediscovering them years later, once we’ve found our footing, gives them nuanced meaning. There’s a pureness to NIHL that Grotzinger should seek to preserve.
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