“It felt a little bit like a victory lap,” said Johnson Hartig about showing again in Elizabeth Street Garden. The last time he did so, for spring 2025, the designer took his bow carrying a “Save the Garden” sign. In the meantime this little patch of green has been spared from becoming a building lot. These days even little victories are something to savor.
Opening the show were a fife and drummer in uniforms in the style of 1776. Then came models in tricorn hats festooned with feathers, cockades and with attached braids. When Adam Ant’s “Stand and Deliver” played later, the reference became more nuanced as military influences mingled with images of Bow Wow Wow’s Annabella Lwin in Vivienne Westwood. Hartig’s Anglophilia didn’t stop there. Print-outs of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Ode”—with the famous lines, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”—were left at each seat. William Shakespeare’s portrait, rendered in dazzling crystals, appeared on garments, and the closing track was The Beatles’ “Revolution 1.” It’s “time for a love revolution,” declared Hartig post-show. “Beauty is more important than ever; it’s one of the most powerful forms of peaceful protest.”
Along with the designer’s insurgence of loveliness came evolution. Hartig’s use of textural linen was particularly notable. Not only was it employed for colorful striped pieces, like a shirtdress, but, most surprisingly, for a group of white tone-on-tone silk-screened garments. “I’ve never done that before,” the designer noted. However, Hartig saw a connection between the black-printed khaki trench coats in this collection and those from the brand’s fall 2004 runway debut.
Yet as Libertine heads into its 25th year, Hartig is mostly looking forwards. The brand just opened a new by-appointment salon uptown, and Hartig’s (relatively) minimalist tonal experiments weren’t his only show of savoir faire; logo lettering on tulle was created using ruched strips of the same material. Some black jackets were bedazzled with the message “forward out of the night.” Write on!
