LA’s Skingraft Makes a Splash at New York Fashion Week.
Grounded in a palette of black and white with a few garments rendered in sunshine yellow, L.A. based designer Jonny Cota staged his first full-blown New York Fashion Week runway show for Skingraft at Chelsea Piers for Spring Summer 2015. The collection offered a tightly edited selection of leather leggings, trousers, tank tops, shorts, silk trousers, skirts and hoodies to comprise the perfect summer weather wardrobe. There were also plenty of layered tunics and dresses with detachable silver metal harnesses.
One of the standouts of the collection was a series of black-and-white skeleton prints that appeared on leggings, dresses and jackets, reminiscent of the early days of Alexander McQueen.
The strong collection Jonny Cota and company sent down the runway was worthy of the brand's New York Fashion Week debut. Cota’s source of inspiration for this show included Shamanism and Santeria, a form of witchcraft in Mexican culture. However, instead of focusing on the macabre, dark side of Santeria, Cota looked towards the vulnerability of the human body as his creative stimuli. There were elements of blood — both wet and dry — present in the red and black marbled prints throughout rendered in leather, mesh jersey, silk and nylon. The symbolic beauty Skingraft shed on the runway was a breath of fresh air.