“This is not a sexy collection!” offered Andreas Schmidl at his and Josef Lazo’s spring presentation in Paris. “Wait, should that be your opening line?”
He was half-joking, but it’s true that of all things sexy and erotic about yesterday’s staging, Schmidl and Lazo’s collection itself barely makes the top five.
For starters, the idea here was to create a sort of voyeuristic experience in which models would change into different outfits from the collection in makeshift dressing rooms with only sheer curtains to shield them from onlookers. They changed from skimpy tank tops into button downs left open, wore speedos and tees and three-quarter-length trousers all with, you guessed it, thong sandals, as many collections this season have featured. The designers explained that the cast had been instructed to mix and match the collection as they pleased. They said they found the result liberating. Seeing models simply get dressed in the clothes following their own tastes and instincts, as opposed to wearing them in a prescribed way, was effective in how it made the Lazoschmidl look more expansive.
The overarching concept was to over impose the private and the intimate while exposing the ways in which this distinction has both loosened and sharpened in the age of the internet. We’re more accessible than ever before, and our personal moments can now be on display with social media. Yet exposure has become somewhat of a performance—one can see a lot of a person online and yet know nothing about them at all.
Schmidl said that they considered this all in regards to the way young men exist online nowadays, including Get Ready with Me videos, “thirst traps” and OnlyFans. “We wanted to show the moment you dress up in a public space,” he said, referring to how the filming of a video could be private, but social media is not. “There is this pressure that society puts on the male identity,” he added. Men are showing abs and pecs and even bulges online to display, and in most cases perform, their masculinity. “You see it all, but a lot of men who are very outgoing on the internet tend to be very shy in real life,” he added. “A study shows that young men don’t have sex anymore because they show so much of themselves and see so much of others that then they don’t want it anymore.”
The connection between this overarching idea and the clothes themselves was less straightforward. Lazoschmidl is, actually, a sexy brand. Its habitual speedos and biker shorts and second skin tank tops recurred here—yet more interesting was where the designers inserted some nuance into their collection. Vertical striped cotton sets, slim ’90s sweaters, and sheer sports sets better exemplified this liminal space between private and intimate, sexy and sweet.