And then there was light. . . . Alexander Lewis isn’t afraid of a religious reference, but he wasn’t riffing on Genesis in his new, light-themed collection. Rather, on this occasion he took Richard Dawkins’s tack, and regarded the science of light with a near-spiritual sense of awe. This season Lewis collaborated with the artist Flavie Audi, who makes sculptures of metal and glass, and he was fascinated by the way light plays on and within her work. That inspired a study of the properties of light—its wavelike form, the way it refracts through prisms, how its reflection glimmers and splits across the surface of things. It was a good season, in other words, for Lewis to have sponsorship from crystal honchos Swarovski.
Lewis got at his theme via a variety of means. He made rubbings of Audi’s sculptures and developed cloud-like prints and patterned jacquards, and he peered into the insides of her work and watched the alchemy of her materials, then created galactic-looking prints that magnified those reactions. There were also crystal-dappled sheer silks, frequently found layered with other, more plainspoken materials such as shirting pinstripe, that recalled the reaction prints’ starry night sky effect. Elsewhere, Lewis conjured light waves via crystal strands dangling off a dress, or caviar crystal pressed into the fabric of a pale blue skirt. Blue was the key color here; this collection also emphasized dresses and skirts more than most Lewis outings. The collection was at its best, oddly, when Lewis interpreted his theme either extremely literally or extremely loosely—his pinstripe pieces were a highlight, for instance, but so was the sweater with a refracting prism intarsia-ed across the front, and a cropped top with mirror cube embroidery.
The one quibble here, really, was with Lewis’s insistence that all his garments express his concept, either more or less directly. In general, his sense of focus redounds to his benefit, but it would be nice to see this designer loosen up a little, and permit himself to, say, cut a sharp pair of trousers, or conjure a fluid, flattering dress, just because they complement the rest of his collection. Lewis gets his points across just fine—he should have the confidence, going forward, not to underline them.
