Holding fast to the conservationism that has long underscored her brand ethos, Gabriela Hearst hosted her Fall/Winter 2021 shored up on the optics of a 50% circularity projection for this year.

In and around an empty New York warehouse, Heart’s 32 looks marched against dimly lit skylights and over damp floors, reminding us of Demna Gvasalia’s splashy rain puddles in the fashion spectacle that was Balenciaga’s F/W 2020 – though Hearst played with much less doom.

Instead picking up the story of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a composer, polymath, poet, philosopher, abbess, mystic, linguist, botanist, and medical theorist, born into a time when women were being pushed out of the intellectual and creative corners of life. “I’m convinced,” Hearst tell Vogue’s Nicole Phelps over Zoom, “that if she had been a man we’d know her name like we do Leonardo da Vinci’s.”

And in a bid to play up that recognition, Hearst incorporates floral illustrations from her daughter Mia, based on Hildegard’s painted work. Ballads of her blooms are strung across the laced delicacies of a double faced, wool crepe trench, and are constructed out of black guipure, corseted by hand-painted belt buckles endowed with mano figas, fertility totems portraying female strength, also inspired by Hildegard’s flowers.

It was an outing of cognac calf square-toes, columns of ecru silk panne, ribbed knit intarsia-ed with tropes of Mia’s floral lace, and camel trenches knotted-up at the shoulder, making for an unerring moment – equally as editorialized as it was realistic. In a lean cadre of muted hues and some outsized proportions, Hearst portrayed fashion’s theatrics to the masses, and did so without fault.

Explore the entire collection below.