REVIEW: New York Fashion Week 2014 - Alexander Wang

You expect certain things from an Alexander Wang show. You expect loud music, a statement accessory or seventeen, an audience that occasionally threatens to overshadow the clothing. This time round, it was Lauren Hutton, Nicki Minaj and South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord.

One of the latter stood up and flashed Wang during his exit bound. Oh, that’s another thing you expect - Alexander Wang is a power-bower, leaping out like a rhythmic gymnastics champ and legging it down his catwalk and back. This time, a slogan across the shirt tied across his waist flashed around his backside: “New Balenciaga,” in the New Balance font.

That was a neat reference to the collection he’d just shown, where something of the rarefied air of Balenciaga (the house Wang has tag-teamed alongside his own as head designer since 2012) with sportswear. Models bounded out in tennis skirts reworked as brief, plisse dresses, scuba-styled sculpted mini sheaths in neon knit, a sequence of midriff-baring camisole tops, worked in industrial looking plastics and pin-tucks. Shoes had socks of fishnet binding them to the foot. Handbags looked like plimsoles squashed together in a gym bag, a notion that wound up oddly attractive.

The whole idea, Wang said, was to translate trainers onto the body - hence the elastic lacing criss-crossing torsos, Nike-ish knits, the New Balance punning. It’s not a new concept - I felt less excited about this collection when I heard what Wang was espousing, having already been there in January with Raf Simons and Karl Lagerfeld for their haute couture collections for Dior and Chanel, respectively. And last year - and more directly - Mary Katrantzou dedicated a section of her spring show to jigsawing blow-up bits of training shoes across the body. It netted her a collaboration with Adidas, which promises more of the same when it’s released later this winter.

It also isn’t particularly new for Wang, but following a few collections stabbing after different styles (that odd shirting thing of last spring, winter’s utility, that odd fuzzy-mittened Paul Poiret turn in 2013) it felt like he had returned to what his customers - and, if truth be told, he as a designer - really want from his label.

It was tricksy, tricked-out American sportswear, which is becoming something of a key note of New York fashion Week (hopefully, not a one-note key note). That souped-up sports stuff isn't just what Wang and his customers want, it’s what the designer is genuinely good at. Hence the fact that the show’s youthful verve, boundless energy and confidence which came from the clothes, rather than styling gimmicks. There was some muscle to these clothes.