Libertine Has Never Been Interested in Behaving

Twenty-five years of sequins, art, irreverence and glorious excess prove the value of having a point of view entirely your own

There is a particular pleasure in encountering a designer whose clothes require no introduction. Before the show notes, before the collection title and often before the image caption confirms what you are looking at, you know. Libertine has spent 25 years building precisely that kind of recognition, not through a logo or an endlessly repeated commercial signature, but through an entire visual universe of color, print, embellishment, art, wit, historical fragments and an almost suspicious enthusiasm for putting one more thing on.

At Spring 2027, that universe was operating at full volume.

Johnson Hartig called the anniversary collection Out of the Chaos and Into the Garden, an appropriate title for a designer whose work has always found beauty somewhere between cultivation and disorder. Shown at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park on September 9, the collection moved through flowers, butterflies, paint splatters, sequins, patchwork, tailoring and sportswear with the confidence of a label that stopped worrying about whether maximalism needed defending a very long time ago.

Butterflies appeared across ivory silk and then grew into enormous paillettes. Bloomsbury-like patchworks covered linen. A painter's drop cloth became the unlikely beginning of another group of clothes after Hartig became fascinated by the splattered fabric left behind while his own foyer was being painted. Rather than cleaning up the accidental composition, he photographed it, manipulated the imagery and turned it into print. The resulting surface appeared across utilitarian jumpsuits and elsewhere beneath tiny transparent sequins, allowing something associated with protecting a floor from mess to become decoration.

That anecdote tells you quite a lot about Libertine. Hartig is a collector in the broadest possible sense. Art, literature, gardening, interiors, Victoriana, ceramics, old graphics and objects that other people might overlook have continually migrated into his clothes. A vintage button card can become a print. Nineteenth-century Valentines can become embroidery. Something dropped on a floor can eventually end up on a jacket. The boundary between fashion and everything Hartig happens to find interesting has always been remarkably porous.

It also explains why Libertine's maximalism rarely feels like maximalism conceived by committee. There is too much personality involved. These are not clothes decorated because embellishment has appeared on a seasonal trend report. They look as though somebody genuinely could not resist putting the thing they loved onto the thing they were making.

For Spring, that instinct occasionally reached spectacular proportions. Large sequined pieces transformed bodies into moving fields of reflected light, while other embellishment was so substantial that the physical weight of glamour became part of wearing it. The menswear offered an interesting counterpoint. A pink suit worn with Converse looked almost breezy beside the more intensely worked pieces, while black stones scattered across black tailoring produced sparkle without surrendering the suit to it.

Then there were the clothes celebrating the anniversary itself. The number 25 appeared in red sequins across a sports jersey and shorts, while party hats declaring “let them eat cake” introduced exactly the sort of irreverence one might hope for from a birthday collection. Libertine did not commemorate longevity by becoming solemn about its legacy. It threw itself a party.

That feels particularly refreshing in contemporary fashion, where anniversaries can become exercises in archival reverence. A house reaches a milestone and suddenly every historic code must be excavated, explained and presented with the seriousness of an archaeological discovery. Libertine has an archive worth celebrating, but Hartig's relationship with the past is considerably less precious. History is material. It can be cut up, printed over, covered in crystals and sent back out into the world.

That attitude has been present from the beginning. When Hartig founded Libertine with Cindy Greene in 2001, the pair became known for taking vintage garments and transforming them through screen printing and embellishment. The practice would now immediately be described as upcycling, accompanied by an entire contemporary vocabulary around circularity and responsible design. At the time, the proposition was much more instinctive. Old clothes were simply exciting raw material. Buyers eventually required standardised sizing and the proportion of one-off reconstructed vintage pieces declined, but the underlying instinct survived: existing things can acquire another life through intervention.

It is tempting to make Libertine sound intellectually serious when describing all of this. The work can certainly sustain that reading. There are references to art history, decorative arts, literature and design throughout Hartig's career. But concentrating only on those references misses the most important quality of the clothes.

They are fun. Not fashion's carefully managed approximation of fun, in which a novelty accessory appears in an otherwise commercially disciplined collection and becomes the social-media moment. Libertine's pleasure is much less controlled. There are colors that refuse to behave, surfaces crowded with information, slogans, crystals, prints and visual jokes. A jacket can look as though it has accumulated a lifetime of souvenirs. Something elegant can suddenly become ridiculous. Something ridiculous can somehow become chic.

Vogue's review of the anniversary show observed that it is nearly impossible to discuss Libertine without arriving at the word “joy.” After 25 years, that might actually be one of Hartig's most significant achievements. Fashion is remarkably good at producing desire, status and aspiration. Joy is harder.

The industry around Libertine has changed dramatically during those 25 years. Minimalism has disappeared and returned. Streetwear became luxury and then luxury rediscovered tailoring. Logos grew enormous and subsequently tried to disappear. Quiet luxury convinced an entire corner of the internet that the height of sophistication involved looking as though one had never knowingly encountered a saturated color.

Libertine kept adding sequins.

There is something almost radical about that consistency, particularly because it has not meant repeating the same collection indefinitely. Hartig's silhouettes are not necessarily where each season's reinvention occurs. The evolution happens across surfaces, references and combinations. New imagery enters the vocabulary. Different objects become obsessions. Decoration mutates. The Libertine world remains recognisable while its contents continue changing.

This is where having a genuine point of view becomes different from having an aesthetic. An aesthetic can be reproduced. Once its component parts become identifiable enough, somebody else can borrow the palette, silhouette and styling formula. A point of view is harder to counterfeit because it depends upon how a designer sees. Hartig's particular talent lies in looking at an object, artwork, garden, scrap of vintage fabric or paint-covered piece of canvas and imagining it somewhere it was never intended to be.

The Spring 2027 garden therefore makes sense as more than an anniversary motif. Hartig has spoken about his affection for the relaxed irregularity of English gardens rather than highly formal landscaping. It is an appealing metaphor for Libertine itself. Things accumulate. Different species coexist. There is structure beneath the apparent abundance, but the structure does not announce itself first.

That is why these clothes can contain an extraordinary amount of visual information without completely collapsing beneath it. The eye can find tailoring beneath the embellishment. A recognizable garment anchors an improbable surface. A simple suit can carry an absurd idea because the underlying object remains understandable. More is not being used to disguise an absence of design. More is the design.

And perhaps this is why Libertine stood out during New York Fashion Week. Not because it was louder than everybody else, although it was certainly loud. Not because maximalism has suddenly returned and Libertine happened to be conveniently positioned for the trend cycle. The collection stood out because it felt almost entirely uninterested in adjusting itself to whatever fashion currently thinks it should want.

Twenty-five years of independence has given Hartig something increasingly valuable: permission to remain peculiar. There is a business reality behind that freedom. Libertine has survived as an independent label rather than becoming part of a conglomerate-scale fashion operation, and Hartig has described his own definition of success in unusually straightforward terms: being able to support himself by continuing to do something creative that he loves. That may sound modest beside an industry obsessed with global expansion, store counts and billion-dollar valuations. Creatively, it is enormous.

Because longevity in fashion is often discussed as though survival itself were the achievement. Libertine offers a better version of it. The accomplishment is not simply that the label is still here after 25 years. It is that after 25 years, you can still tell immediately why it is here.

The butterflies change. The prints change. The objects being collected change. The decoration becomes more or less extravagant. But the curiosity survives. New York has plenty of designers capable of making beautiful clothes. Libertine continues to offer something harder to manufacture: a world you could only have entered through the mind of the person who made it.

And thank goodness nobody convinced Johnson Hartig to tone it down.