LIAM HODGES LOOKS TO LAS VEGAS FOR HIS SPRING 2019 COLLECTION

Designer Liam Hodges was drawn to Las Vegas for his spring/summer ’19 collection by the Donna Tartt novel The Goldfinch, with the main protagonist and lost soul Theo spending time in the city.

Learning from Las Vegas, the seminal Post-Modernist manifesto by ’less is a bore’ architect; Robert Venturi praised the Vegas strip for being all imagery and sign, prioritizing pow and wow, over the then prevalent quasi-religious orthodoxy of machinery for living in.

Of course, Venturi couldn’t have foreseen how fifty years later, the landscapes and architecture of Las Vegas would look to Millennials and Gen Z more like our everyday than anywhere else outside of a computer game. Or, as Hodges says, the shimmering city in the desert is all “hyper real and surface texture.”

Hyper-reality is something Millennials and Gen Z-ers can’t drop: “everyone I know is worried about the future, no one I know wants to be ordinary,” says Hodges. “We’re always competing against this hyperreal version of ourselves.” This post-millennial dread informs his riffs on dystopian and coming of age themes. Las Vegas, he says, “is a dystopia that’s real but as made-up as the rest” a land of “extra everything” for a generation who feel extra-everything is their right.

So, what’s Liam Hodges’ guy look like in Vegas? “Outdoorsy but not, easy-wear slick trash.” To that end there’s a leopard print and flames with everything. Leopard print cardigans, waistcoats and shorts, bowling and cowboy shirts with flames, Hawaiian shirts with flash tattoo details, sun-bleached track suiting, plaid all day pajamas, and short shorts. Matching this easy extra everything aesthetic is Liam’s take on Fila’s mid-nineties chunky running shoe, the Mindblower. T-shirt and hoodie prints include a centurion chest plate, the legend “Alone Together” inspired by the nuclear testing museum and a Tee inspired by The Goldfinch that reads “I’ll shave my head I guess and get a tattoo.”