While retaining its identity in aesthetic driven, innovative techniques and boundary pushing textiles, PHELAN S17 introduces a selection of refined details to its repertoire. Deconstructed nightgowns, flesh-tinted folded fabric prints, asymmetrical pleats, pintucks, pointelle, metallic dissolvable fringe, staggered straps, and artworks that mimic unraveling basket weaves challenge a narrative of conventional femininity while emphasizing artisanal crafts traditionally regarded as a female’s domain. Effortless silhouettes and softer fabrications are balanced by edgier elements in the form of oversized grommets, bold bull rings and graphic jacquards.

A key inspiration this season surfaced through artist Caitlin Macbride’s oil on canvas series of rumpled cloth. These cleanly rendered, dream-like, fabric landscapes painted from still life are an exercise in constructing and disassembling the space atop a canvas through fragmented shapes. This building up and breaking down is embedded within the image itself, and so it was for the process of printing the fabric portraits back into material yardage.

The S17 performance, choreographed by Shannon Gillen, focuses on an exhibition of the female form in all its contradictions, both its power and vulnerability. The repetitive tone of the choreography explores synchronicity and showcases looping gestures to a paired down rhythm. The show’s music is an original piece by Brooklyn-based composer and producer Michael Dragovic. The track conveys exertion through the use of human breath. Blurring the lines of what is recorded and what is performed, the piece is imagined from the sounds that comprise the room itself: the creaks, breaks and slides of old wooden chairs and the breath of the women sitting in them.