You can hear a Duro Olowu presentation before you see it. Walking up the stairs to the apartment he borrowed from a friend to show his clothes this season—the interiors a maximalist riot of patterns and prints wholly befitting Olowu’s own eye for clashing extremes—you could hear the peals of laughter echoing down the corridor as the designer regaled the assembled crowd of editors with the stories behind each piece. “Sometimes people say, how come we end up laughing so much at these previews?” Olowu added. “Well, I think if you’re not laughing, you’re not having fun.”
If there was an operative word within Olowu’s spring collection, it was certainly fun—but while there are plenty of looks to put a smile on your face, the technical rigor behind each piece is no laughing matter. A trio of tailored opening outfits in a blazing sunflower yellow—a trench coat cut just so at the calf, and a pair of pantsuits, one roomy, one cinched—were cleverly configured to be mixed and matched at will. A 1920s-inspired coat and a series of separates and swishy dresses featured an especially lovely striped print that Olowu likened to the endpapers you might find in Victorian books, patchworked in contrasting colors and meticulously seamed together on the diagonals where the points of the bias meet. “I wanted that familiarity but still that strangeness,” said Olowu. “It’s about taking a delicate pattern and making it quite bold.”
There was plenty more boldness to come: multi-print bias dresses with ravishing clashes of romantic florals and geometric block prints, or with ruffled trims on the sleeves; knee-length coats with kick flare black slub silk trousers poking out from underneath to dance around the models’ ankles; boxy duster coats with playful polka-dot buttons; and an especially dazzling jacket cut from a wild combination of gold lamé, chenille, and raffia. “I wanted each piece to feel like its own living, pulsating thing,” Olowu said.
As always, however, look a little closer—beyond the kaleidoscopic mish-mash of florals and polka-dots and rowdy prints—and every detail was rooted in Olowu’s obsession with practicality. The hoodies he introduced last season proved to be a surprise hit among his art world-adjacent clientele, and they made a return here, styled with nothing but a pair of sandals. A supremely elegant take on a bomber jacket, featuring precisely cut bell sleeves, is likely to be this season’s best-seller, and the dressed-up-but-laid-back look of a sleeveless, paneled tuxedo jacket and trousers was so winning it elicited a sharp intake of breath from the assembled editors. “It’s about turning it down, but revving it up,” the designer said. If anyone can translate that seemingly paradoxical sentiment into beautiful clothes, it’s Olowu.
