Libertine celebrated its 25th year with the spring collection, which included let them eat cake party hats and a sports jersey and shorts with the number 25 flashily worked in red sequins. This get-up had a much more assertive glamour than the silkscreened vintage pieces with which Johnson Hartig, then working in tandem with Cindy Greene, first made the fashion world sit up and pay attention, but it retained the graphic sophistication and decorativeness that have always defined Libertine.
A libertine is a person, generally a man, who lives a sybaritic life, unbound by social or moral norms. Is Hartig himself of that ilk? If he were, the label probably wouldn’t be in existence. It remains a successful independent brand largely because the designer has seemed to heed the advice of Voltaire’s Candide: “We must cultivate our garden,” meaning something like work brings focus, meaning, and value to life. Hartig is, however, an outlier in so far as he works from Los Angeles. The designer argued that he is a rule breaker: “I don’t know how to make a garment. I don’t know how to sew, and I don’t really want to know how to make a garment. I’m interested in the aesthetic side. I have an incredible team that thankfully knows how to make garments very well. So yeah, everything about Libertine has kind of been unconventional from the beginning.” To some extent, yes. At 25 the brand is part of the establishment and caters to an audience who live well manicured lives, which made one of the hero pieces, a coat with decorations of boxwood topiaries in Versailles boxes, spot on. It’s a wondrous piece, with the thread work being soft to the touch and convincingly resembling moss. Another weighty, but magnificent, topper took its Tree of Life motif from a historic carpet. The flower paintings of Odilon Redon were another highbrow inspiration. The theme, Hartig said, was “as always loosely garden based.” The idea this time was to progress “out of the chaos and into the garden.” His preferred style of horticulture is English, i.e. more relaxed and natural than formal.
That spirit of letting go was well captured by a print based on Hartig’s painter’s spattered drop cloths. This was cut into workwear-like jumpsuits as well as covered in small, clear sequins that had a subtle glint. Hartig really flexed with large sequined pieces that were blindingly glamorous and turned the model into a living disco ball of sorts. It’s nearly impossible to write a Libertine review without using the word “joy.” It’s clear that Hartig is passionate about what he does; in fact the designer defines success as “being able to support myself doing something creatively that I love. It’s a real luxury.” His enjoyment seeps into the clothes which are both fun to wear and to see being worn.
Newness at Libertine comes not through silhouettes so much as ever-changing decorative motifs. And while the menswear pieces in the collection weren’t radically different from those that have been previously shown, they felt really fresh; like newly planted perennials in a bed of annuals. It’s clear who the Libertine woman is, but is the Libertine man her husband or her son? As truly remarkable as the hand-worked pieces were, some were weighty—as with all embellished pieces—in a way that would required the wearer to work a bit for glamour. A man in a pink suit and classic Chucks walked with ease, however, and the subtle glint of black stones on a black suit was unexpectedly electric. This Californification (i.e. a more casually elegant take) of menswear is something Hartig might carry into womenswear as he moves past the 25-year mark.
