NEW YORK, United States — "I don’t know what extremely rich women want,” says Creatures of the Wind’s Christopher Peters. “But I know what my friends want.” This season, Peters and partner Shane Gabier have taken this ethos to heart, lowering their prices 30 percent on average, all the while continuing to produce their collection in the US out of Italian fabrics. For spring, the majority of their pieces are priced below $1,000.

Not cheap by any means and still very much designer. This isn’t a contemporary — or highly merchandised — collection, but it does align more closely with who Peters and Gabier are. Instead of making pieces that are extravagant in price, they were extravagant in process. After seeing a great deal of success with reworked vintage fur coats for fall — and a range of embellished vintage t-shirts and sweatshirts, embroidered with cannabis as a part of a collaboration with haute-weed brand Marley Natural and System Magazine, which sold out within a month — they have taken the idea further for spring. Leather trench coats from the 1970s were stripped, reshaped and then hand-painted. (Peters called the experience “cathartic”.) They’ll retail for $795.

Along the way, Peters and Gabier let go of some of the pretenses that have weighed down some of their recent collections, and simply made pieces their friends — many of whom walked the runway — might like to wear. It felt less referential, more wonky. The new direction was perhaps best represented by the Tyvek trench, digitally printed with a broken swirling rainbow canvas. The screwy technicolor dream coat nicely communicated the designer’s exploration of the history of psychedelia — a big part of their “research" for the season — and it was also cool-looking. Which is the only thing it needs to be, really.