too cool for school

So it finally arrived – the COS spring/summer 2010 collection! Seeing this now, I’m afraid I’ll be writing more about COS after I quit the company, because it got just a bit edgier, just a bit more simple and the dots are above the ‘i’’s this time around.

For spring COS lightens up which is a great relief after a horrid season of black black black (nomatter how much black I can cram in my wardrobe, I could never appreciate a shop stuffed with black like a turkey with apples and buckwheat) – the colours are kept within the range of cream, alabaster, pearl, acid yellow and surprising injections of gold and tar. There’s a side to COS that is incredibly futuristic, but in the 90’s way. The flattened out shoulderpads and slim silhouettes remind me a lot of Topshop’s current season with its endless flying saucers, so may be the 90’s rave references spring out from this similarity. Yet as usual COS keeps it cool and practical: skirts with huge collapsing pockets and draw-strings, zippers and rivets embellish otherwise basic trousers. The fabrics are textured but the shapes are clean – that’s where the catch is - and with even a minimum of decoration COS keeps the clothing balancing on a very thin line between romantic and conceptual.

I am in love with the trechcoat-dress in golden silk, the printed dress with bleached seams, the aforementioned draw-string skirt and the asymmetric white dress.

Yet there’s always the Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde – the romanticism turns around into the Raf Simons-like aesthetic. Haber-style mesh shirts gain shoulderpads and become dresses worn deliberately over white garments. This look is as sterile as a school lab where children play around with bottled frogs – surprising and yet so domestic and innocent.
A huge part of the collection draws inspiration from Erwin Olaf’s photo series ‘Grief’, Patty Smith and school lessons – poetry to science.