Through the Garden Gates of Carolina Herrera’s 3,000 Flowers in the Sky

No matter the season, attendees at Carolina Herrera’s runway shows can count on a few certainties: that they will be greeted with glamour, inspiration grounded in creative director Wes Gordon’s most top of mind artists, literary figures, films, or architecture, and the personal touch of a single seasonal bloom at their seats. But last week, Gordon greeted runway show attendees with not one but a field of 3,000 red ranunculus blossoms that appeared to have grown from the concrete within a cavernous floor of the SOM-designed Solow building in Midtown. The magenta field broke through the pall of Manhattan’s recent onslaught of gray winter mornings, spellbinding guests and social onlookers against the backdrop of a snowy Central Park.

It was an evocative image: the models, crisscrossing their way through Gordon’s metaphorical garden to the beat of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting,” in billowy trousers, rosette-adorned separates, and swaths of silk satin. “A garden is something you tend to meticulously, putting great care into every stem, every bloom,” Gordon says of the inspiration he found this season in his “favorite film,” Being There. “I had this vision of the models in the collection wandering through this garden that had sprouted miraculously from the concrete—and Bureau Betak and florist Eriko Nagata were able to effortlessly bring this to life,” he tells Surface.

The garden imagery ties back into Gordon’s vision for the label, which he took over in 2018, both symbolically and as he considers its future evolution. “Like the seasons evoked by Being There, there is a continued evolution in the cycle of growth and regeneration,” he says. “For example, I have always loved reinventing our signature cotton white shirt season after season; for this collection, we decided to take the classic look of the white shirt and ball skirt and reinvent it in an oversized silhouette, worn over a crinoline skirt with black lace—something that feels unexpected yet undeniably Herrera.”