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Among many other things, Conner Ives is an excellent storyteller. As he talked through his latest collection, titled Camelot, the designer spun a rip-roaring yarn of a journey from the medieval lords and ladies of Arthurian legend to the invocation of Camelot by Jackie O to describe the Kennedy administration, all the way to the winking subversion of American history employed by Cole Escola in the Broadway hit Oh, Mary!
Though for Ives, who was born and raised in upstate New York before moving to London to study at Central Saint Martins, it was less a case of storytelling per se and more about exploring the rich American tradition of mythmaking. “It was recently the 10-year anniversary of me moving to the UK, which is insane,” he said. “I started thinking about that unwavering entrepreneurial spirit of being American, and how a lot of my work is in pursuit of identifying traits of Americana that aren’t just, you know, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and red, white, and blue.”
Where Ives’s first few collections saw him scroll through a rogue’s gallery of American female archetypes (from Swans to Y2K Hollywood starlets, Chelsea Girls to Real Housewives), he has changed tack slightly over the past few seasons, homing in with anthropological intensity on a tighter pool of inspirations. And this time around, the layering of centuries—medieval England, 1960s Americana, the international It girl of today—made for a surprisingly effective sartorial palimpsest. Slinky knit dresses with trumpet skirts were inspired by cotehardies, a kind of medieval underlayer here reinterpreted as something resembling a Henley top, while jacquard knitwear took its cues from the elaborate motifs found on 17th-century clocked stockings. A sleek and very ’90s striped white mini dress featured a playful tulle bustle. A motif of what appeared to be a magician on horseback cropped up across spaghetti strap tops and as a panel on striped boxing shorts that were trimmed with lace.
There were a handful of new riffs on some of Ives’s signatures too: notably his elastic-thread shirred technique, which appeared in the form of painterly floral tops and mini dresses as well as a pair of blazing red pedal pushers. Oh, and plenty of fabulous dresses for the loyal coterie of glamorous party girls that surround him, from a swishy mauve pink dress hand-painted with wonky polka dots to his final “bridal” look, a silk jersey column dress with a dramatic vintage fox-fur collar. (The ever-resourceful Ives whizzed it up from offcuts of a custom look he recently created for Rihanna.) “Everything is kind of an assemblage of different centuries and different dress codes and different cultures coming together, which I think also reflects that sense of American mythmaking at play,” he said, “this idea that these things could be constantly taken apart and collaged back together—that you could take a bustle and put it on a polo shirt.”
