Originally posted by NYT.com
An Unlikely Icon
By GUY TREBAY
It used to be thought that inspiration came to fashion makers in a flash of lightning. A designer woke up one morning and thought, "Tube socks and lederhosen!"
Now, every dressmaker spins a yarn to explain a collection — whether about moonlight on the 1920's Riviera or the late shift at some brothel as imagined by Luis Buñuel.
Most designers these days ply the byways of narrative, but few do so with an odder enthusiasm than Patrik Rzepski, a gifted 20-year-old unknown whose collection, seen on Saturday in a theater off Union Square, showed the kind of promise that means the global fashion houses will soon be beating down the door.
That the scantly attended presentation was seen mainly by fashion students and friends should serve as a rebuke to people in the business who gripe that new talent is hard to discover.
Of course, Mr. Rzepski (pronounced szep-ski) was not doing himself any favors by choosing as the center of his presentation an unlikely icon not destined to seduce the fashion pack. The show was called "We Miss You Myra," and the woman in question was Myra Hindley, the notorious English murderer.
It has been 37 years since Ms. Hindley was sentenced to life in prison for assisting her boyfriend, Ian Brady, in the gruesome murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17. Among other atrocities, the pair recorded their victims' cries and then buried their bodies on the desolate northwestern heaths.
Called the "moors murderers" in the press, the pair continued to evoke hatred until they went to their graves. Ms. Hindley's death watch (she died of respiratory failure last November) was lavishly covered in the British press.
"I've always been fascinated by her," said Mr. Rzepski, who was still in high school when the art show "Sensation" opened at the Brooklyn Museum, with Marcus Harvey's portrait of Ms. Hindley painted with prints of children's hands. "Tragic stories have always inspired me," said Mr. Rzepski, a design-school dropout, who has shown four collections, among them one based on JonBenet Ramsey and Sharon Tate.
"For her first date with Ian Brady," Mr. Rzepski explained, "they went to the Nuremberg trials."
Mr. Rzepski's show had its own disjunctions. Half was given over to clothes of dubious motivation, printed with Ms. Hindley's image or made from batiks dyed to create the impression that the cloth had been buried (one dress was, in fact, briefly interred). The rest of the small collection was a revelation, beautifully pieced from fabric fragments, diagonally overlaid in petals with the edges left raw.
A lone blonde wandered out onstage wearing a simply shaped strapless dress whose red cloth pieces looked bruised at the edges. A spooky recording of the wind played as she took a seat, with her back to the crowd. The woman remained there motionless as a succession of dresses came along that were classical, subdued and ingenious.
An asymmetrical skirt rose at the waistband and was caught with suspenders, suggestive perhaps of the 1960's and yet not the predictable period quotation. The Hindley narrative was underscored by motifs of the noose. And a blouse or two bore the legend "I Want Moor Myra." But these seemed less outré than like distractions from the assuredness of Mr. Rzepski's young talent. Even his palette — red, white, black and a muted chartreuse — suggested confident maturity.
The images of Ms. Hindley were intended less to shock, Mr. Rzepski insisted, than to evoke the radical social changes in Britain at the time.
"I think of that picture of Myra as the beginning of punk," said Mr. Rzepski, whose design gifts are, luckily, greater than his historical grasp. "I'm really not focused on shock value or becoming a public-relations darling," said the designer, who is stocky, disheveled, and whose partial Mohawk brings to mind a younger Alexander McQueen.
"In fashion right now either people are gluing sequins onto T-shirts or making cashmere stuff that's amazing for old ladies," Mr. Rzepski said. His clothes are sewn in his one-bedroom apartment, with the help of two friends.
He has a small celebrity following (Maggie Gyllenhaal was photographed wearing one of his dresses), but so far his dresses have not been bought by major stores. "Everybody says to me, you need to move to Paris, because New York isn't ready," Mr. Rzepski said. If so, then everybody would be wrong.
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