“It’s a very Euro moment,” noted Jason Wu, the man who notably dressed First Lady Michelle Obama. The designer did his part to right that balance with a spring show that was based on the tenets of American sportswear. He also gave us another reason to love New York, by choosing as his location Isamu Noguchi’s Sunken Garden at the Chase Manhattan Bank Building in the Financial District, built between 1961 and 1964. It’s an interactive art piece in the sense that the viewer has to look down into the Garden to see it at the street level; inside, where the show was held, it’s viewed through a round wall of glass. In any case it demands engagement, and Wu’s all for getting beyond the surfaces that are the lingua franca of fashion.

This was a very personal collection, Wu noted during a preview, and one of his goals was to show that’s he’s a different person than he was when he was anointed a wunderkind in the 2010s. The rawness of the space was meant to match the rawness of the clothes, some of which were hand distressed or had unfinished edges. This was a continuation of a theme introduced last season, but applied to spring clothes. Let’s face it, Wu’s never going to be a punk—just as the concrete floors were softened by beautiful arrangements of wild grasses and wild flowers, so his pieces were pretty. Still, it was clear to see that the range was broader than usual; not only were there light-washed jeans and ethereal tanks done the Wu way, but separates options for evening as well, such as a raw-edged, bias-cut slip dress in various shades of sky, shown over flowy, wide-cut jeans. Something as simple as showing dress-up clothes with flat platform sandals made them assume a different attitude, the ease often associated with American design.

TV show “The Last of Us” had Wu thinking about destruction and rebirth, hence the delicate fabric deconstructions. “I wanted to embrace imperfection,” he said. The prints of the season were inspired by ’30s scientific drawings, and 19th-century etchings. Wu redrew a pattern based on the latter and included the face of Anna Mae Wong within its lines and swirls. There was a nice gravitas and hand feel to this style, and it was a good contrast to the AI-generated underwater film the designer worked on in collaboration with Matthieu Grambert, an artist he found online. Hearing the call of the sea, the sinuous forms of octopi were used as embroideries. There were mermaid hems, and seaweed-like ruffles.

Wu is spellbound by the possibilities of prettiness. The layering looked new, if slightly in the direction of Dior Men. And the fluidity and movement of his pieces was both convincing and effective. Proof of which is that while lost and walking in circles post-show, all this viewer could think was that the small streets of FiDi were angled like the bias lines of Wu’s ethereal dresses.