Libertine FW24 Charmingly Captivates The Now Slightly Delirious Spectator

Libertine’s New York Fashion Week showcase foreshadows the next seismic shift in the industry. Maximalism is the latest fad, haven’t you heard? As the world persevered through lockdown and a global recession, people have emerged from captivity teeming with a sort of hunger unparalleled in history. Consumers now operate on a hunger for connection that will result in wild hedonism- this will be mirrored on our runways. However, this grand excess is not merely an infatuation for Libertine FW24 by Johnson Hartig.

The East Coaster’s latest assemblage is a kitschy incarnation of a Year 7 art teacher channelling Ziggy Stardust, who bravely embarks upon Andy Warhol’s New York with an unironic [but terrible] British accent. Hartig’s work may be a mishmash, hodgepodge, and ‘whatever sticks’ drivel, but it is certainly fun. Fun in that you witness an adult who has not had their child-like excitement stifled – or stoutly refuses for it to be extinguished by adulthood.

Libertine FW24 Collection

Subtextual Intertextuality

To begin, models on the runway bore the universe on their shoulders. They wore galactic-printed trench coats splattered with random objects only humans would recognise. The print and random collages were almost meme-like. There was a horse, Egyptian monuments, jewellery, flowers and a dog with drawn-on eyebrows? Had earth exploded onto canvas, this is what it would look like.

Then, Hartig made a suit entirely of red lips and American doll teeth. And suits of contrasting colours stamped with words of various sizes. There were five illustrations of this look – as each one passed, the words got larger, and the spaces got wider. The words DARKNESS, PATHLESS, FORGOT, WITHER’D screamed attention. These words, with bleak connotations, starkly contrasted with the animated clothing on the runway.

Upon further investigation, the words come from a poem by Lord Byron called ‘Darkness’. The speaker in the poem recounts a dream [or premonition] where the sun finally burns out, and the world is left without light. In this darkness, mankind become beasts and civilisation perishes.

Libertine FW24 Pop Culture

Pop Art Party

Johnson Hartig utilises the Pop Art movement to exemplify the descent of the world today. The movement’s founder, Richard Hamilton, defined it as – ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business’. All descriptives foreground the mindless consumption ingrained in modern society. Hartig channels Andy Warhol in an effort to critique mass production, fanfare and impermanence of ‘popular culture’. Something the Californian designer would know all about.

The pop-art techniques used in the collection cement the social commentary embedded in Hartig’s work, such as the Ben-Day dots used to depict eyes, lips, ears and nose. All sensory instruments to the corporeal human experience are linked to overconsumption, indulgence, excess, and hedonism. First, they were colourful and oversaturated, and then without colour. Oversaturated. How comical that the models wore wigs which resembled the colourful, stringy, sensory fidget balls we had as children – I wonder where those went.

What a spectacularly fashionable piece of storytelling intricately told through art.