Alejandro Gómez Palomo, founder of Palomo Spain, recently launched his spring ‘21 collection The Rehearsal. As he told Vogue, “it’s rehearsing a situation in which we don’t know what’s going to happen and what’s going to work. We don’t even know if it’s spring ’21 because we don’t know what spring ’21 is going to be like. So we did it for the pleasure of making a beautiful collection and for the spring that we did not have this year.”

For those in isolation, the facade is a welcomed one. The ongoing quarantine has completely redefined the dynamic between individuals and their surroundings, a period of restricted movement and lessened interactions. There’s a certain longing; longing for agency, for control, for sustained contact with others. There’s a desire left lingering, in an atmosphere rife with frenetic tensions.

Yet, despite such dissonance, there’s also an opportunity to ground oneself in the most rudimentary aspects of existence. Palomo seems to ask, how do we maintain connections to embodiment and intimacy? How do we surface each other through our encounters? How do we interrogate our connection to the space we occupy? 

At first, clothing might seem to be an inadequate response, one removed from the more precarious aspects of reality. Palomo disagrees. 

As he told filmmaker Miquel Díaz Pont, curating a collection means “discovering new worlds each time, and not worlds you can already see, but the world you create yourself from certain references.” It’s “creating new stories and then telling them.” 

Those stories might just come embedded into the movement of a frill, the silhouette of a hat. They’re “irreverent” and “provocative”, drawing connotations of all that’s burgeoning beneath the surface. Indeed, the collection references themes of nature and ‘rebirth’, once again returning to the fundamentals. 

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The pieces themselves are made of previously discarded materials, reconfigured from previous seasons. There’s a bit of subversion: Palomo (in a press release) noted the urge to refute “demands of the capitalist market”, in which collections “lost the technique and local artisan work that is slow by nature.” Even the chromatic palette, made of mostly natural hues, is a stark contrast to the demands of an industry predicated on cosmopolitan consumerism. 

Palomo does what he does best: dares to conceptualize a world not quite as contaminated with the plights of this one. It’s jubilant, it’s playful, it’s undeniably queer. It’s modeled after the Palomo boy—innocent yet promiscuous (flowers are sexual organs, after all), undeniably beautiful. This, of course, is the motif. Palomo has stated “beauty is everything I’ve wanted to be surrounded by my whole life”. 

In essence, stop and smell the roses. Albeit intricately woven, purposefully poised ones. At the very least, stop to watch The Rehearsal below: