Tim Hamilton
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REVIEW
COMPLETE COLLECTION
NEW YORK, February 10, 2011
By
After one season in Paris and another off the calendar, Tim Hamilton is again showing his namesake collection in New York. And in a way, New York provided the germ of the collection: The designer sublet a studio from artist Ross Bleckner and, after rifling through the painter's archive, proposed a collaboration. Bleckner's smeary, abstract almost-florals, which appeared on Hamilton's jackets, pants, second-skin turtlenecks, and, for his women's collection, dresses and separates, unified the whole. Replicating Bleckner's vivid colors also gave Hamilton a chance to indulge his taste for far-flung production and fabric play. (He found a Japanese factory that was up to the task.)Proportion usually gets goosed chez Hamilton, too. In both collections, jackets and shirts were lengthened to slightly creepy, attenuated effect, layered short-over-long. Hand-knit sweaters got long sleeves but cropped bodies. For men, shell-like outerwear in rubberized vinyl and neoprene looked protective, futuristic, and a little mutant. Uniforms and military trappings tend to loom large in Hamilton's imagination, and he mentioned Aldous Huxley's dystopian fantasies as a point of reference. There was a bellicose quality overall, only heightened by the glowering, street-tough models and their scowling doppelgängers, the boys in longtime collaborator Collier Schorr's photographs, printed on cotton T-shirts (part of Hamilton's secondary Redux range). With all that stewing, the Bleckner prints lent a kind of cooling levity; there was also some warm-blooded heat from the hints of shearling lining or the occasional blast of vermilion red. Some more of that wouldn't hurt. Brave New World it may be—but baby, it's cold out there!
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