A Company presents Their Season IV

For Season IV of A–Company, the brand questioned the archetypal dress, the sheath, to explore our relationship to femininity through clothing. As defined by Merriam-Webster, a dress is:
“1. Apparel, clothing
2. An outer garment (as for a woman or girl) usually consisting of a one-piece bodice and skirt
3. Clothing, adornment, or appearance appropriate or peculiar to a particular time
4. A particular form of presentation.”

Using the definition as a formula to deconstruct, A–Company rearranged the shapes of the sheath to discover new silhouettes. A dress becomes a skirt, and dress pattern pieces become graphic blocking or textured cut outs on other pieces. Overcoats in a more classically feminine style are tailored on the top and at the bottom reveal bound seams, exposed pocket bags and raw edges, examining the presentation and performance of clothing. While sticking to the foundation of the brand, there continues to be strong tailoring throughout, as well as intelligently draped garments. The fabrics took inspiration from associations with traditionally feminine clothing such as lace, brocade, and satin, while juxtaposing them against harder fabrics like suiting, crisp poplin, coating, check wool, and denim.

In the presentation of the collection, A–Company collaborated with director Eva Evans to create a film: A Failed Attempt at Understanding Time, exploring our experience of time through the repetitive tasks of the everyday finding a metronome of gesture in the movements between objects and body, the concrete and the natural.

The oversized triptych installation video follows one woman, performed by Evans, moving through three scenes at three different times. In the first scene, she makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches using an entire loaf of bread, later appearing again to cut out square shapes of the sandwiches and carefully pack them in her bag, and finally reenters to clean her space. In between Evans in the scene, the camera follows gestures of the objects left behind: the teetering stack of sandwiches, a slow-moving jelly drip, and the Wonder bread bag delicately unraveling. In the second scene, she works to inflate a ball, again and again, eventually allowing the ball to consume nearly the entire frame. She returns to move the ball around a cornered room with her body. And finally comes back, draping her weight over the ball while it slowly deflates, and then leaves.

In the final scene, she copies Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” on a yellow legal pad at a desk and reenters to make photocopies of her writing. The viewer watches the printer stack of paper overflow and bend with the weight and hear it fall. As the previous scenes, she returns to the space for a third time, to collect her copies, and leave the space as it was before entering. As the viewer experiences the 30 min short film, Evans’ body becomes a sculpture in space, and the clothing acts as a secondary character performing and moving alongside her. The sound, sculpted by Tal Katz, builds on the naturally recorded sounds to layer each movement and texture to create the score for the piece. In a separate room, with an installation of the collection, a video of an egg set to boil plays on an old monitor, creating a tension with time and a play on the idiom ‘a watched pot never boils’.

The film traverses thinking around time, repetition, cycles, and replication. The brand continuously designs to the edges of these themes to question the everyday, the body in space, and clothing production.

CREDITS:

LOOKBOOK
Photography: Danielle Alprin
Model: Sarah Abney
Stylist: Shayna Arnold
Hair: Ledora Francis
Makeup: Andrew Colvin

EVENT
Set Designer: Elysia Belilove
Set Assistant: Eliza Sanchez
Sound Engineer: Vincet Dee
Video Engineer: Scott Hadley
Photographer: Danielle Alprin
Producer: Anouk Colantoni

FILM
Clothes: A–Company
Director: Eva Evans
Director of Photography: Kevin Hayden
1st AC: Yuya Kudo
Sound Mixer: Turner Curran
Stylist: Malaika Crawford
Styling Assistant: Frederick Miller
Hair: Ledora Francis
Makeup: Andrew Colvin
Production Designer: Elysia Belilove
Set Dresser: David Eardley
Associate Producer: Arielle Berman
Editor: Alex Amoling
Color: Jenny Montgomery at Company3
Sound Designer: Tal Katz