Christopher John Rogers And The Dawn Of The Cultured Zoomer Doyenne
An optimistic view of the twenty-something mind’s ability to dart from idea to idea.
Even if you were not at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Tuesday night for Christopher John Rogers’s Resort 2023 Show, you could feel the love in the air. It radiated through the Instagram images and stories and captions like “It’s giving full circle!” and “I’m deceased!!!” Every designer on the planet is trying to drum up a community spirit now, realizing it’s better to cater to a rabid few than to try to compete to make the same few things they think women want.
But Rogers has always had that. “There really is a strong community of people that really understand what I’m doing,” he said on a Wednesday morning phone call. He’d intended to forego the celebratory pirouettes that have become his post-show signature, but when he came out at the end of the show, he felt so much excitement from the standing ovation that he found himself leaping perhaps higher than ever.
“I’m recovering from, I’m guessing, a sprained knee from last night,” he said. Did he feel like the most beloved designer in New York? “Maybe! I don’t know,” he said. “I think I'm enjoying continuing to be as specific as I am, but also as expansive as I am.”
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Rogers is a designer who makes a leap forward with each collection. He is confident, and a very hard worker. But truth be told, while his declarative shows have always been unmissable and he’s undoubtedly one of America’s biggest fashion stars, at times his clothes have lacked a kind of panache. He often talks about figures like the trash bag, the Pierrot, the preppy Southerner, and it would be a shame to say goodbye to any of that. And his color palette is always excellent. But some of his clothes have occasionally been too clownish, not living up to the spirit of aggressive delight the designer himself imparts.
But Rogers, it seems, is through his growing pains. You could see even in runway pictures how painstaking he has gotten about the construction of his clothes: Look at the heart-stoppingly-pink tunic dress, yanked down on one shoulder and standing up to frame the face with swan-like grace on the other. Or take the plunging gray plaid black-buttoned jacket top with wide lapels but a ruched, cinched bodice that begs you to cup your hands on your waist Irving Penn-style.
Perhaps because Rogers presents his collections chromatically, rather in what he describes as the more “prescriptive” narrative- or silhouette-driven runway show structure, you can really notice the details. What Rogers calls “really just a shirtdress” is a satin experience of sexy movement, again in that alarming pink, with an elongated collar dropped open to reveal a padded cone bra top. (Boy-yo-yoing!) Regardless of how you respond to colorful clothes by any designer (and there is a huge subset of fashionistas right now enmeshed in a quixotically tasteful entanglement of beigery), you have to respect how hard Rogers works on these clothes.
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But this is more than hard work; his bustier top and swagged skirt in a color I can only describe as determined, sparkly concrete, or his big button-up ball gown (in plaid taffeta, duh) with its sweet belted waist, are, to use the parlance of CJR stans, giving Edith Wharton realness. By that I don’t mean costume—I mean they conjure the discreet but sultry sensuality and emphasis on presentation that the Gilded Age author’s writing so lovingly picked apart. You look at this collection, and Rogers’s clothes at their most successful, and you don’t say, “I want to be her,” but rather, “Here is a wild sartorial invitation I can integrate into my life.”
That sort of pragmatism is out of fashion in America. It’s hard to find simply a great dress, simply a great jacket. (Why does everything have a hundred cutouts?!) It’s even harder to find something that’s beautiful but also unique, special, artful. “I do like thinking about things that maybe feel out of fashion or feel quote-unquote dated, or feel like something from a bygone era and then like shaking it up and making it feel very now or very future,” he reflected.
When I described his customers and fans as digitally savvy, he seized on it. “With being digitally savvy comes an understanding of the fact that multiple things can be true,” he said. He embraces the mishmash—that feeling that you’re scrolling through Tumblr and see a cool photo of flowers, and then you find a recipe for the perfect margarita, and suddenly you’re in a rabbithole of 1970s editorial images of crazy-romantic designer Bill Gibb. The feed brain, as it were.
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Rogers sometimes carps about his detractors, which may be a product of his age; he is 28, so a young millennial, Zoomer cusp. (God, can you imagine what his clothes will look like in 10 years?!) People born in the late 1980s to mid-90s are often especially obsessed with their haters, real or imagined. (Rogers’s haters, at least to this writers’ eye, are very much in the minority.) The doubters, Rogers said, tend to be people who grew up looking at fashion in that narrative or thematic way. You know, those inspired by the ole muse-with-the-manor, usually French or British, who was way ahead of her time in the early 20th century. (I find these women were often not-so-secretly fascists. Le fave problematique!) Those types of fashion viewers can’t sense a clear message or narrative or throughline in Rogers’s work; they just see volume and color and a lot. One look may have nothing to do with the next, Rogers said, other than its color, and that rankles some people.
“I feel like that’s not the way that I work,” Rogers said, of that more old school approach. “And so I feel like a younger [person], or someone with a more nuanced understanding of aesthetics and art and fashion and culture, can get it.”
This article originally appeared on Harper's BAZAAR US.