LONDON-BASED brand Natasha Zinko recently held their autumn-winter 2024 runway show last Friday during London Fashion Week with a collection that emanated themes of futurism and escapism.
Over the last two seasons, Natasha Zinko looked inwards at our inner monsters for her AW23 collection and looked downwards at the ground for SS24.
However, this season, the designer looked upward toward an idealistic future where the unbelievable becomes the everyday.
Looking back to the 1960s, Zinko delves into a time when humanity made the great discovery of escaping Earth for the unexplored mysteries of outer space. Inherent to humankind is the yearning for exploration and evolution, with a key example being Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 predictions.
Filmmaker Kubrick and science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke brought out the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in the early 2000s, where space travel via commercial airlines and stewardesses holding upside-down trays was the norm.
However, in 2024, sixty years after our discovery of travel to outer space and 23 years post-Space Odessey, nothing seems to resemble the hope and excitement we believed humanity would have accomplished by this time.
With our current state of global affairs and the environmental crisis, one could say disappointment is rife among us. Zinko looks at these themes, refusing to lose hope with an ongoing optimistic outlook towards the future.
The collection materialises these thoughts and ideas through a series of characters appearing as off-duty astronauts as they strut down the runway with a strong and purposeful walk, wearing padded underwear jumpsuits and oversized jackets with bent spacesuit sleeves.
Flight attendants are identified by tidy pastel pink dresses followed by additional looks featuring simple tracksuits paired with streamlined boots, evoking a sense of futurism. The collection prioritises comfort and uses uncycled workwear to bring each look to life.
As for accessories, various looks were paired with 3D-printed sunglasses, which traced the shape of the face with a slick design presented in colourways of black and white.
The Natasha Zinko AW24 runway collection explored themes of the imagination with a positive outlook on what we can become and what we can achieve as we never lose hope and determination to make our predictions and dreams materialise, such as our mission to outer space and until then, we continue to fantasise, and we continue to pretend.
by Nicole Pereira