Libertine

“Joy matters in the world, and joy matters in the world maybe now more than ever,” says Johnson Hartig, who, as a Gen-Xer, is no Pollyanna. He retains the ability to get excited about things, and his collections are created around his passions and penchants for things like punk posters, Surrealism, gardening, and the 18th century. “Joy is in me. It’s not gonna stop being in me because I’m distressed about where we’re at with the planet. It’s going to be in me until forever, but I’m a realist joyful person,” he clarifies.

Maybe it’s that realism that inspired Johnson to introduce solids in a big way this season. They’re in saturated colors and heavy-ply silk, and they are meant to be worn with the brand’s more elaborate pieces, like a jacket bedazzled with a shower of flowers or a blazer with shiny black paillettes that create a ruffle effect down the arm and have a music of their own. “A Libertine total look is for really very few,” says Hartig, but oh, how tempting they are.

Key prints for spring 2022 include Roy Lichtenstein–like dots, strawberries, and lilacs. That last motif was inspired by one on a vintage dress that was shown for spring 2006. The reissued eye print dates to the brand’s first show in 2003. You’ll see one at the Met’s In America: A Lexicon of Style exhibition.

18 years ago Hartig was working with Cindy Greene, and Libertine’s MO was silk-screening vintage garments. “I feel particularly proud, at this moment as the world is falling apart, that we were one of the renegades of reusable, recyclable, green, greener fashion,” he says. “The fact that we started exclusively using vintage clothing was really purposeful and meaningful to us.”

At the beginning, the pair were bicoastal, with Hartig sewing in Los Angeles and Greene printing in New York. Frustrated that ideas were “getting lost in translation,” Hartig taught himself how to silk-screen. “[The eye] was one of the first prints that I did,” he recalls. “I thought, Wow, this surreal eye, coming off of clothes and looking at you from all directions… it sounds magical. So that was the genesis of it: surrealism, the people I love most, Dalí and Jean Cocteau.”

Hartig is endlessly attracted to Surrealism’s “sense of surprise and small joys,” and this season its main expression is through dimensionality rather than trompe l’oeil: Pendant strawberries are applied over printed ones; ditto the blooms of lilac on an opera coat.

Another Libertine mainstay is crystal appliqué; two-tone chinos with garden treasures like carrots and radishes and a manuscript in Mozart’s hand are blown up and rendered in Austrian glass. Text is a recurring theme in Hartig’s collections (see the music-poster-inspired hoodies). “I love the idea of poetry in motion; following behind someone that’s wearing a coat or a jacket with a poem on it and catching glimpses of a sentence or a word as they move. I just love the romance of it,” he says.

This is an anniversary year for Libertine, but Hartig’s taking all of that in stride: “We’ve kind of been celebrating our 20th for the last two collections,” he notes. (This is the third in the series.) This season follows in the same vein, a mix of archival prints and new, which seems to be a magic formula. “Sales have never been better,” says Hartig, “so I’m just going with a good thing.” As he has from the start.