“My theme for this season started out as a little bit of a nod to grunge.” Raquel Allegra was discussing her new pre-fall collection over Zoom. The first look, a plaid sleeveless shirt tucked into a matching button-front skirt and worn with a colorblocked plaid shirt tied around the waist, may seem like an obvious nod to the crisp Seattle weather; but she wasn’t just thinking about flannels. (Especially not for a high summer collection.)
“We were thinking about a ‘grunge state of mind’ in the way clothing falls apart and you love it even more,” she explained. The plaid, for
example, comes from a watercolor Allegra had done, and when you got up close, the textural details of the print had an element of romanticism. The news for pre-fall is that her signature tie-dye prints are nowhere to be found, swapped out for an extremely subtle “sun fade” effect in shades of faded black, faded yellow, faded pink, and faded green. “It looks a bit sporty because they have a ‘repair tape’ down the side seam,” the designer said. “It feels so nice to have a sort of clean and simple version of something we’ve been making for 15 years; but it sits within the collection more like a basic, like a foundation piece.”
Contrasting the washed-out shades were photo-realistic bold flower prints made from scanning images from the designer’s own garden, which she printed on poplin for the first time. Allegra also experimented with turning fabric treatments into prints, evident in a simple light gray silk slip dress with crooked green lines running across it that brought to mind a certain kind of topography. “The treatment itself is really intense: you color the fabric, tie off sections of [it], and then completely bleach out most of the color. It would be a pretty intense process for silk; so having it as a print makes having that same ‘look’ much more feasible.”
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