Libertine Fall 2018 Ready-To-Wear...Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

“I am a maximalist. I am a maximalist in personality. I am a maximalist emotionally… it’s just what I am,” said Johnson Hartig moments before delivering a ginormous bundle of joy to NYFW with a collection that was deliriously OTT (even the models’ nails were fringed) and represented a high point of the designer’s career....
Free of the sometimes consciously clever references of the past, this collection felt more personal. It was a valentine to the fashions and clothes that made Hartig want to be a designer in the first place.

Since its founding 17 years ago, the brand has evolved both in size and technique. Silk-screened vintage has segued into lavishly embellished pieces, many made of custom Italian fabrics with decorations hand-worked in India. Hartig has always had a magpie aesthetic, something that's trending now that it’s been taken up by the likes of Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. The Libertine look doesn’t approximate vintage, though; the collection is about 60% production pieces and 40% upcycled, “and it always will be,” Hartig vowed. For Fall, the designer said he moved on from using pieces from the 1940s and 1950s, and mixed a few Jazz Age dresses with “1980s Lacroix and Ungaro and all these things that were my education watching Style with Elsa Klensch on CNN on Saturday mornings. That’s a dream,” he said, “to be carrying on this tradition by taking these clothes that have sort of been discarded… and being able to add my bit and see them carry on.”

Among Hartig’s additions were typewriter keys, fringe, bedazzled Chinoiserie motifs, crazy quilting, netsuke prints, edging reading #libitup, and sequined portraits of Cher. Clearly, the designer is a non-linear thinker, and it’s not just upcycling that gives his work circularity: the show was presented with an all-embracing feel-good spirit of hopefulness and joy, all much needed antidotes in these dystopian times. For Hartig, this collection is, in part, a reaction to the current political morass. “I think that one of the greatest forms of resistance that a creative person can do is to just create beauty and take it as far as they can,” he said. In doing so, Hartig reached a personal high and transported his appreciative audience.