Picture this, you are in a galaxy far, far away, grabbing a drink at Mos Eisley Cantina in Tatooine after a long day of planet hopping and intergalactic misadventures. You look across the bar and there’s an alien, the only one with a friendly face. Their slogan T-shirt reads: “Willie Norris for Outlier / fall 2023 ready-to-wear / Look 1/29.” This looks familiar, so you open your Vogue Runway app (yes, in another galaxy) and realize that the Willie Norris for Outlier collection gallery has gone meta, becoming real right in front of your eyes.
Any self-respecting sci-fi fan will recognize Mos Eisley Cantina as a famous location from Star Wars, but for the uninitiated, it is a bar located on the desert planet of Tatooine. Here, it serves as the imaginary setting for Norris’s fall 2023 lineup for Outlier, part of the IDEAS series where she explores garment ideation, which she then distills into Outlier’s mainline collections.
Norris’s fall delivery is partitioned into five sections. The first group is a commercially desirable gorpcore fantasy. It sees Norris explore what “extraterrestrial company issued uniforms,” as she called them during a preview, could look like at Outlier with distressed and overdyed twill pants, mylar film fabric corsets, and zip hoodies sewn with the wrong-side of the fabric out, this last being one of Norris’s simplest but strongest ideas this season. Group two is about “intergalactic surgery tourism,” as evidenced by the blown up lips and bandaged faces, and finds Norris experimenting with silhouette through extra large padded bombers, scarves, and ponchos —these offer a compelling runway take on the deeply utilitarian-first world of Outlier.
Group three are dramatic re-workings of plaids—the zip-up collared shirt in look eight will sell like hotcakes. Norris’s popular injected linen tailoring comes in group four, her “business people,” in streamlined multilayered silhouettes, and group five consists of two looks: a fantastic jacket with a zippered hem with a prosthetic alien hand covering the model’s face in reference to Ridley Scott’s Alien, and a final alien in a T-shirt dress with the slogan “I left.” Paracord Nick Cave-esque body suits, a technical handmade feat, punctuate the collection.
But Norris is not only making alien masks for good ol’ fun, she is expanding on her spring concept, where she partnered up with AI artist Zak Krevitt to convert her models into AI-generated aliens. This season, she brought that back to the physical world by bringing two of Krevitt’s alien concepts to life as masks. What Norris did here with a collection aptly titled “Proof” is establish a two-way channel of communication between the AI and the IRL. This last idea stems from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” where the author defines technology as a cultural carrier bag, not a weapon of domination: “technology is a tool for cultural advancement rather than a tool for ruining the existing culture,” Norris said.
But in between all of these compelling concepts, it’s Norris’s personal angle that packs the bigger punch. The designer is fascinated by aliens because she feels “often incredibly alien in many spaces,” but she’s decided to find solace in her otherness, hence her friendly aliens. The plaid story this season is about social assimilation in a cis-het male world. And then comes the theme of body modification, which is intrinsic to Norris’s identity as a trans woman, she said (“I’m constantly battling with this idea of either vilifying it or glorifying it, where it’s actually neither, it just is”). Norris’s voice within today’s political landscape in America—with its constant assailing of trans and queer folk—is important, even more so when it’s broadcast by a label like Outlier that is deeply rooted in utilitarian menswear.
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