Marques'Almeida Spring 2021 Ready-to-Wear Collection - Vogue.com

A crew of Portuguese girls will bring Marques’ Almeida’s spring 2021 collection to the world from Porto, on the historic banks of the river Duoro today, opening a window on the designers’ outlook on doing fashion better. “We’re doing it in downtown Porto, overlooking the riverside, where the port wine cellars are. It’s an outside space that’s just been opened up, where there’s going to be a fashion museum,” says Marta Marques. “We’ve got a huge open-air backstage, so all the models and crew will be safe—and we’re only doing eye makeup, so the girls can wear masks while everyone’s prepping.”

Marques was talking through their plans ahead of time from the studio outside the city where she and her partner Paolo Almeida have been with their Portuguese staff since lockdown, with their new baby Alice making smiley contributions in the background. “Cool, desirable, accessible, and sustainable” is how they describe their brand’s holistic reset since they split their operations between London and their homebase earlier in the pandemic. “We couldn’t just continue as we used to, doing huge collections,” Marques explained. “That’s stopping. The waste generated was getting a bit crazy. For a small brand, it seems daunting to try to become sustainable. But for us, it’s better to start somewhere, even if it’s not perfect. And now we’re holding ourselves accountable for it.”

Well, visibly, this is the Marques’ Almeida solution for doing better with less—that mantra we’ve been hearing echoing through many a Zoom call since the pandemic hit. The collection walking today is an upbeat manifestation of all Marques’ Almeida attractions: boyfriend jeans, dresses and tops that sprout flounces, oversize tops, sexy knitted slip dresses. An example of their economy of style is a pair of frayed-edge denim tunics inspired by Janis Joplin—one blue, one pink—which Marques swears they came up with seasons back: “It’s slightly dangerously short! We like that the sleeve is slightly belled, and it’s the same length as the skirt.” But who even realized that they’ve even been making that great piece, which self-evidently can be utilized as a dress or a top, or whatever-we-want? In the flurry to produce ‘statements’ and novelties that pressurizes all designers, such things so often dip out of sight. What’s seen and what’s unseen in fashion is the question these designers are tackling head on.