Zana Bayne’s Celestial Beings

Zana Bayne’s trade, since she started her eponymous line in 2010, is leather. The Brooklyn-based designer has fashioned wickedly covetable harnesses, collars, belts, and bras out of the supple stuff, collaborating with Prabal Gurung and Nicola Formichetti and outfitting Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Lorde. The erotic, and yes, the fetishistic, is always at play in her intricately constructed geometric designs, but her Spring 2015 show, which she presented last night at Milk Studios, embraced a more ethereal side.  

Entitled “Moonbathers,” Bayne took beach dressing to a restrained (pun intended), elegant extreme, naming ’40s screen siren and scientist Hedy Lamarr and iconoclastic Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli as reference points for the retro-charged collection, which paired winged bras, molded bustiers, and waist-cinching cut-out peplum pieces with head wraps and breathy, crisp shirting and shirtdresses. “Not only was she a profound designer, she was part of Surrealism at that time, so I wanted to bring in some of those elements,” Bayne says of Schiaparelli, and her use of several recurring motifs and celestial elements (floating metal hands, stars, Swarovski crystals, and crescent moons) underlined the theme. “It all worked into this idea of the beach at night,” Bayne explains.

The shirting, a collaboration with Norisol Ferrari, which ranged from the classic button-ups to pleated skirts and wholesome milkmaid-esque dress silhouettes, extended Bayne’s continuing preoccupation with the body and the hourglass figure: cinched at the waist, full at the bust, and even fuller at the bottom. “I’ve always loved mixing leather with shirting. It can be a way to bring a lightness. It’s also a very seasonal thing for me, to create shapes that work with the weather,” Bayne says, adding, “Nothing looks quite as good as a big shirt with the waist cinched in.”

For more from New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2015, click here.