Magda Butrym has a huge season ahead: In September, she’ll make her runway debut on the New York Fashion Week calendar—thus far, her Paris Fashion Week outings have been classified as presentations—and, following a successful pop-up last year, she’ll also be opening a permanent store in SoHo.
“I have to get it all ready before I go on vacation,” the designer said on the very eve of her departure. With this precollection, she added, “I wanted to just continue our story, keeping the ideas but doing them in a more wardrobe-ish way.” By that, she meant hewing to classic shapes and techniques like hand-crochet, but reconsidering them with new colors, materials, and attitude.
The designer continues to mine Slavic cinema, this time with the scandalous 1996 Andrzej Zulawski film Szamanka. In it, actress Iwona Petry—in her first lead role at 20—delivered a raw, feral performance as a student entangled in a shocking, sadomasochistic affair with an older academic. The sartorial outcome, as Butrym described it, is both “pristine and undone with a strong sensual streak.”
In the showroom, the brand’s signature leathers looked strong, with some shapes cropping up in new iterations: A best-selling blouson was back as an easy wrap in heathered gray wool, for example. Hourglass curves dominated on everything from sculptural knitwear to outerwear, often with lashings of pearls and sometimes a sly touch of (faux) mink, as on a sharp-shouldered, nipped-waist peplum jacket in black wool underpinned with a removable panel of chestnut-hued fur. Elsewhere, a gold lamé cocktail suit shone like an Oscar statuette. A short jacket in bubblegum pink jacquard plus a couple of sculptural bustier dresses that would do Jessica Rabbit proud popped loudly in a lineup rife with ’80s-leaning silhouettes.
But Butrym also reached even further back, gamely taking on the humble housedress her grandmother wore in the 1960s. Here, she gave it a contemporary spin as a button-front shirtdress in sepia cotton with a white floral print and side ties, worn over a lace-trimmed slip. One of her best moves was taking crochet techniques bigger and bolder, bypassing traditional kerchiefs and dainty whatnots in favor of a knee-length skirt or a very pretty capelet that could work as easily over a T-shirt and jeans as an evening gown.
By the designer’s own admission, making everyday clothes while staying on brand is a challenge. Though this look book skews more vamp than day-to-day, the full lineup ran the spectrum from workhorse essentials in leather to office-appropriate attire and sultry little nothings in silk. That will likely keep her base happy while also opening the door to newcomers.
