Parachute Pants and the Confidence of a Decade That Didn’t Know Better

Daniëlle Cathari was 23 when she put together her collection for Adidas Originals, which is either inspiring or humbling depending on where you happen to be standing. Her work does what the best nostalgia-driven fashion does: it doesn’t reproduce the 90s so much as distill the feeling of them—that particular brand of athletic self-assurance that existed before streetwear became a luxury market with its own anxiety.

The silhouettes push proportion to their limits in the way Cathari tends to: unexpected material combinations, the three stripes stretched and recontextualized. Bra tops against floor-length parachute trousers. A peach dress that splits the difference between sport and something more playful. The blue-and-yellow jacket, skirt, and sweatshirt trio is the obvious centerpiece, and it earns the attention—it looks like something excavated from a specific moment and then redesigned by someone who understood exactly why that moment mattered.

Kendall Jenner fronted the campaign, which is the kind of move that guarantees visibility while telling you almost nothing about the clothes themselves. But the clothes don’t need the guarantee. The collection is available through Adidas.