When Whoopi Goldberg drops by your fashion week presentation, you know you’re doing something right. While Rio Uribe will also display his unisex line Gypsy Sport during next week’s women’s shows in New York, he provided a preview of his full genderless vision on all male models this week, during NYFW: Men’s. Whoopi or no Whoopi, it was a reminder of why he was one of the three winners of last year’s CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.
First things first: Uribe used photographed swatches of skin as the basenote for his collection. They appeared on tracksuits as printed squares of ebony, beige, chestnut and honey. They looked like pixels from a zoomed-in selfie, or like a digitized Chuck Close. On closer inspection, you could see the wrinkles and mottling of real skin; the patchwork, it turns out, comprised snapshots of the IRL epidermises of Uribe’s team and friends.
Thinking about skin, as Uribe was asking you to, the models themselves represented every color on the human spectrum. Gypsy Sport’s message has always been about inclusion, about creating a subculture or tribe that unites rather than divides. And that was clearer than ever this season. The brand’s spinning hat-planet logo was printed everywhere, in among the swatches on flared Lycra pants, on zip-front training jackets, and on the waistbands of loose athletic shorts.
Uribe’s other mainstay has been an interest in sportswear — both its shapes and its social codes. For fall/winter 16, he dabbled in soccer. Or at least, that’s what the blue-and-white makeup of some models suggested. Baby blue track jackets, worn shirtless, were paired with soccer fan-style face paint (half white, half Man City blue) — like a nod to British hooligan culture. Alluding to a culture so infamous for its animosity, and reframing it in such an all-inclusive context felt like a radical move.
Credits
Text Alice Newell-Hanson
Photography Jonathan Grassi