Since 2019, the Australian designer Edward Cuming has built his namesake brand on a decoupaged, raw-edged, improvisational quality, all bold colors and contrasting fabric, which yields a pleasing kind of chaos. This season, he wanted to rein things in and go, if not minimal, then at least a bit quieter than usual. “The brief was to be a bit toned down,” he said at his Paris showroom. “But it didn’t really work out.” He paused. “Well, for me this is quite toned down.” (To wit: he named the collection “Calm Down.”)
Cuming started from his usual place of intense fabric research; it wasn’t until halfway through the season that he discovered a photo of the Italian designer Lina Bo Bardi’s modernist Brazilian home that brought the season into sharper focus. There’s an emphasis on interior textiles like a creamy damask; a shimmering, almost aged jacquard; and linen with metallic threads of the kind often found in wall coverings or drapery. He also tried his hand at straightforward gray wool suiting for a more grounded proposition, and mixed it with cotton drill or shirts with a swirling tonal embroidery. But his wilder side persisted in shaggy zebra prints and an orange t-shirt with a tiger graphic on it, lifted from a feline sculpture he spotted in Bardi’s home.
The best parts of the collection were where the push-and-pull between exuberance and restraint played out, as in a simple, Corvette red cupro slip dress layered with a filmy gray fabric that together produced a hazy shade of purple. “We wanted to take a really intense color, and mute it. So that was really satisfying,” he said. His signature Circle Shirt, which features concentric rings on the front with their edges left undone, was this time fully finished for a more controlled, but still novel, outcome. “We wanted to try our hand at something precise and, I guess, serious.”
In the showroom, the collection was divided into neat sections—one in pale neutrals and those upholstery fabrics, another for the buttoned-up tailoring, and another for the wilder, looser pieces. In the lookbook they’re styled together. The message: Don’t let anyone box you in or tell you you have to choose between fun and formality—with Edward Cuming, you can have both.
