Sharon Wauchob Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection
“The best-laid schemes of mice and men/Go oft awry,” wrote Robert Burns. So it was when Sharon Wauchob’s archive was flooded. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe there is a reason for this,’” she explained on a call. But neither nature nor faulty plumbing could keep her down; the designer decided to see opportunity in this minor calamity. “I wanted to test myself and my independence a little bit, to see where that would go,” Wauchob said. “I felt a little bit more courageous.”
And she was: there was a boldness to this collection as well as a sense of what she described as introversion. The flood happened about halfway through the design process. By necessity Wauchob had to spend time with her archive, which allowed her to absorb elements of the past into her new work. Putting things further into reverse gear, Wauchob, as she wrote in her show notes, photographed work-in-progress garments and made drawings from the pictures. “The beauty of fashion illustration is often in the exaggerated strokes often left behind on the page,” she wrote in the show notes. “Why not bring them into the actual pieces?”
Wauchob works in watercolor, meaning that even big gestures—of which there were several in this offering—are somehow gentle. This was achieved in several ways, one being the play between hard and soft, as in the opening and closing looks. Starting the proceedings was a trench-like cape coat of wool silk that could be worn with the arms free or in the sleeves, is accessorized with a feather-trimmed bandana. The finale jacket had architectural sleeves and a marabou throw cascading down one side. A burgundy coat with a canvas feel was similarly given a soft faux fur collar. Wauchob also challenged perceptions of the properties of materials. The blush-colored jacket peeking out from under an exaggerated faux fur scarf is not made of nylon but a wool so fine as to be almost transparent.
Making room for perfect imperfection, Wauchob “destroyed” velvet’s perfect pile by pleating it after it had been sewn into a garment. Slips, suspended from infinitesimally fine straps, featured irregular hand-pinked and hand-finished edges. The coils on the sleeves of a hand-knit mohair coat were disrupted by stitches.
Spiral cutting, a Wauchob specialty, was used with abandon. Worn upside-down, the inky black blouson you see in look four has a different fit. Spirals cut into lengths of shadow-like black chiffon seemed to hover around the body. In glossy caviar black silk they cascaded down the chest or a leg with the abandon of seaweed, manifesting the “sense of inner maximalism” Wauchob wanted to conjure.
