Giovanna Flores has an instinctual approach to making clothes that is informed and influenced by not only the materials, but also the process of designing and sewing. She works mostly with deadstock fabrics and vintage garments, but also with the “scraps” that are the natural by-product of making clothes, utilizing a technique she calls “blind fitting,” which she described a few years ago as using darts and seams without representation of the body, and then placing them on the body to fit them. Last season, she held a fashion show at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery as part of the “The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion,” where her work was also being exhibited. “It felt very scrappy to me like, literally, the scraps were coming out of the seams and sort of out of the body,” she recalled at her Brooklyn apartment that doubles as her studio. One of the highlights of that collection was a sheer long sleeve top with bits of different colored fabric popping out of the shoulder and side seams, outlining the body in color instead of covering it. “I’m always developing collections until the last minute, and always at the end, I feel like I start to come up with new ideas and then I’m like, ‘shoot, I have to hold these for next time,’” she said.
And so where last season the scraps felt like their own little universe, this season they returned to the body, cinching and encircling it. A pink mini-dress got its form via diamond-shaped darts that were shown inside out, while bits of fabric that seemed to overflow from the waistband of skirts and the necklines of tops and dresses were a bit of a happy accident. “I wanted these clean-finished edges, so I thought I would use the scraps as the facing,” Flores explained. “Originally the scraps were meant to be on the inside but then as I flipped them I thought, ‘Oh, maybe that’s just what’s nice about it.’” On a white skirt the pink and patterned pieces gave the illusion of a slightly deconstructed peplum. It was paired with a black halter top pieced together from irregular shaped bits of fabric; across the bust the fabric had been replaced with a fringed “patch” made from thin hand-cut tubes of jersey. It had an undone kind of elegance about it. This jersey fringe added interesting movement and texture to many other pieces—looping from the shoulder of a white tank top, gathered into a bikini top, and added as an embellishment on bold colorful tights which then peeked out from underneath dresses. Flores’s take on dresses is always charming—a few in a light-as-air floral cotton voile pieced together with a more robust white and blue cotton; a yellow silk slip dress with contrasting jersey triangular insets made from vintage T-shirts at the chest. An easy pink sheath had two fathers below the breasts, as if the dress had been pinched with fingers and somehow kept the shape. Flores said: “To me it feels like developing film, where you don’t really know what it’s going to be and then you put it on and it’s like, ‘oh this is great.’”