Since 2017, Dirty Pineapple, the Shanghai-based design collective founded by Elsa Zai and Nellie Wang, has fused the trendiness of casual streetwear with high-fashion aesthetics. For their Spring 2020 collection, showing during New York Fashion Week, the brand is overhauling its view of fashion completely, with the mission of creating a new you.
As the world looks for ways to become more sustainable and undo centuries of destruction in light of climate change, Dirty Pineapple's new line seeks to upend exhausted fashion trends with the concept, "Recycled Love." Recycled Love is based on pure feeling, a place fashion-obsessives can reach when they destroy the egoistic self.
DIRTY PINEAPPLE: Spring/Summer 2020 Runway Show
As such, the collection shown is imbued with this sense of freedom: relaxed, unhurried takes on unisex suiting, jumpsuits, and roomy hoodies-and-trousers combos are full of clashing colors and interesting prints of various body parts. The prints throughout are reminiscent of snakeskin and tie-dye, universal fashion symbols representing either glamour, uninhibited self-expression, or nostalgia.
To that end, Dirty Pineapple's latest collection seems to suggest that in order to move forward even as the world burns, we must reuse what's most important to us and bury what isn't. Perhaps wearing these clothes will feel like wearing a new skin, if only to leave the old you behind.
Photos via BFA