Peter Do's catwalk debut and the return of post-ironic fashion A turning point for fashion in the coming years

Yesterday in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in an open area next to the East River, what was perhaps the most awaited show of New York Fashion Week was held: the catwalk debut of Peter Do. It was obviously not an absolute debut – the brand saw the light in 2018, with a presentation in Paris that immediately earned it contracts with nine large buyers including Net-a-Porter and Dover Street Market. Fast-foward to 2020: Peter Do is a finalist for the LVMH Prize (he already won the LVMH Graduate Award in 2014), Anya Taylor-Joy wears one of her dresses for the Saturday Night Live finale and both the lookbooks of the FW20 and SS21 collections are greeted with a unanimous enthusiasm of the press, buyers and the public.

Before interviewing Peter Do last January, Kat Herriman of Cultured made an important reflection that explains Do's rapid success and, transversely, also the success of the former pupils of Phoebe Philo da Céline, including Daniel Lee of Bottega Veneta. According to Herriman we are at a turning point where the ironic fashion trend that in 2015 exploded with Demna Gvasalia and Alessandro Michele, who respectively quoted and parodied the aesthetic codes of the working class and the upper middle class, is about to end - the market is so saturated with brands that want to look special that no one has focused on being special anymore. Today the trend is reversed: the success of brands such as Bottega Veneta, The Row and Peter Do himself, but also the revival of the Armani archive and brands such as Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli, highlights the start of a post-ironic fashion, which no longer wants to be paradoxical and quotationist but focus on the final product, on the very nature of fashion that,  in the most basic terms possible, it consists of creating and selling clothes. In 2018, prophetically, Peter Do explained to WWD:

«I think it’s time to get back to garment making, producing things in New York, supporting the craft, supporting locals, authenticity, making clothes. I feel like nobody creates clothes anymore, everyone creates hype».