Walter Van Beirendonck Fall 2023 Menswear Collection

Last summer Walter Van Beirendonck was in the oceanside Puglian city of Otranto. He wandered into the Cathedral of Santa Maria Annunziata and enjoyed a revelation. It was sparked by the ‘Mosaico di Otranto,’ the church’s sprawling middle-ages mosaic, which I too can attest is a wonder: an enormous and intricate musing on the nature of life and death created by forgotten hands in fragments of colored stone.

Inspired, Van Beirendonck found himself sketching his own riff on the mosaic’s tree of life, creating a cast of serpentine characters with decidedly phallic characteristics and glints in their eyes. Tonight he transported these, in prints, patchworks, and intarsia, into the Salle Wagram to inhabit a collection that reflected on sex, death, and environmental collapse under the credo: “We need new eyes to see the future.”

What looked like skateboard wheels were removable parts of a clothing-defined exoskeleton. Jackets bolstered with pockets at the ribcage and then jackets with cut-out sections in the same place furthered this construct. Models wore crystal-flecked fishnets as shrouds, sweaters, or stockings, funereal veils with a hint of kink that acted as a mournful emphasis on transient beauty. Many of the garments were inflatable, items of airbag protection against the cruelties of inevitable fate. These were the heavy, eternal anxieties that ran below a collection which—even after a 45 minute delay and 20 minute run time—was a fun and provocative watch.