Elle Fanning, Karlie Kloss and Dree Hemmingway star in the Opening Ceremony SS15 play at New York Fashion Week
Spike Jonze and Jonah Hill treated NYFW to a stylish satire last night as their one-act play for cult label Opening Ceremony was deemed brilliant by theatre and fashion critics alike.
Bored with the monotony of traditional runway shows, OC designers Humberto Leon and Carol Lim (who also helm Kenzo) commissioned Spike and Jonah to write ‘100% Lost Cotton’, a comedy about the bitching, beauty and backstage catfights that fashion week stereotypically spawns but, we promise, we’ve rarely seen in real life.
The plot followed its characters –models, stylists, designers and journalists – through the run up to an OC fashion show. Elle Fanning and Dree Hemmingway were models competing at an OC casting, while Rashida Jones played fashion editor and Karlie Kloss, “in her late early 20s”, made a cameo as a past-her-best super.
There were f-bombs aplenty as the fictional Carol and Humberto, played by Catherine Keener and John Cameron Mitchell respectively, laid into their prey.
The clothes (because, let’s not forget, this was still a fashion show) worked naturally with the scene. Set in the summer of 91, we saw sports-based silhouettes covered in forward slash prints, a nod to the early days of web coding.
‘[The idea] came up in Humberto’s living room four or five months ago,’ Spike Jonze said of the project. ‘He was telling me about Kenzo’s Fall/Winter 2014 show. He watched 15 David Lynch films over the course of two weeks. It inspired him to get into David Lynch’s mentality, and then he designed a whole line of clothes as if he were actually David Lynch, and he got the actual David Lynch to design the set and music of the Kenzo show.’
‘It’s been so cool to see it evolve,’ said Jonah Hill of his first experience as a playwright. ‘A dude’s head literally got chopped off in the first incarnation. Now, it’s this really emotional play about two people.’
See all the images in the gallery above.
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