London Fashion Week: Men's FW20 Streetstyle

London Fashion Week: Men’s recently kicked off the the Fall/Winter 2020 season with a schedule featuring Wales Bonner, Martine Rose and Paria Farzaneh. As well as the collection’s on show, the fashion week attendees also stepped out in a range of eye-catching prints, bold outerwear and statement accessories.

Bracing for the cold January weather, key outerwear pieces included items from Burberry, Prada and Junya Watanabe, while stand-out accessories from the streetstyle crowd included the Telfar shopping bag, a Louis Vuitton trunk bag and Dior’s Rimowa collaboration.

Additionally, the FW20 season also featured a focus on tailoring from attendees, with oversized blazers, formal footwear and ties all appearing alongside the usual streetstyle staples.

Source: HYPEBEAST

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Martine Rose Fall 2020 Menswear

“This is my daughter’s school, and it’s really great and optimistic. I just wanted everyone to feel that,” said Martine Rose. “Kids, young people, education are our future and we should invest in them. Primary schools are magical. The teachers are here, there’s a lot of people with kids—it’s another community, isn’t it?”

People still talk of the open-air show that Rose put on in a neighborhood square in Chalk Farm for summer 2019; it really was one of those atmospheres that make misty-eyed memories. She was one of the first designers to sit a fashion audience among local residents. Warm, friendly, inclusive vibes, without being saccharine, are what she’s very good at fostering. This time, we were sitting in the hall of the public school that Rose’s four-year-old attends, surrounded by children’s art, banners commemorating the anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement, and boards asking kids, “What kind of leader will you be?” It created that same sort of local family vibe, to start with.

As a character, Rose is a strange mix of unpretentiousness and self-belief. One of her favorite games is playing with logos and slogans. “Martine Rose Expect Excellence” read one. The words “Tottenham, Croydon, Clapham Junction, Tooting” were woven into jacquards on her big, lairy tailored jackets, name-checking all the areas in London that Rose and her family have lived and worked in. She’s actually a champion of the ordinary and the bizarre—and her talent in fashion is that she doesn’t make any distinctions between them, or between what’s considered beautiful or ugly. “The inspirations are always the same. It’s always about outsiders,” she said.

Nor does she particularly comply with seasons, or doing something completely new every time she has a show, which is according to when she feels like it. Her street-cast crew were indeed her avatars of oddness, from the side-swiped frizzes on the top of their heads, to the margins of extra sole beneath their feet, in collab with Six London, according to show credits.

In between, Rose clothed her neighborhood heroes in pieces she said she’s reprised from her archive, “with a bit of friction” from something sexy. Black latex made an appearance as she cut a signature wrap-fastened jacket as an elongated coat-dress, and put kilt buckles on a tight, shiny pencil skirt. Womenswear? No, she hasn’t really done that before. Rose may be a responsible, education-promoting mom of two in her 40s these days, but it was no stretch to imagine her in these bits and pieces back in the day when she was dressing up to club in the ’90s.

Those who buy Martine Rose are, similarly, believers in the offbeat and the slyly subversive, as well as others of the romantic persuasion that there is or ought to be an underground way of dressing. (Whether that’s actually been killed off in the age of constant self-documentation by Instagram is a moot point.) If she intends it or not, her black leather western waders are a dead cert for a street-style pose-parade outside some show at a men’s fashion week in the not very distant future.

There is a lot to appeal to the male fashion geek too: Those who are in the know understand what the Farah brand meant to the Jamaican community peacocks of style in the ’70s and ’80s, including pants with perma-creases, as worn by Rose’s uncle, “but this time expanded to XXXL proportions.” Messing with heads and proportions is also a Martine Rose specialty. The way she belts trousers hitch-up high with a spoof circular metal R-logo buckle, for instance. Ditto with her interpretation of the Casuals’ habit of knotting sweaters around their necks on the way to soccer terraces and pubs in the ’80s; she’s melded the shape to become scarves.

Others may be attracted to Martine Rose pieces because they are just cool and simple to wear; men who don’t want to be carrying a massive brand overstatement around with them. The checked coats fit that practical bill; so do her frill-front shirts. Geek fact: When she started out on her own over a decade ago, Martine Rose tested the waters with a small line of shirts. The waters said that a tide of in-people, designers, stylists, and editors wanted to get their hands on them. Which is how, little by little, Martine Rose became one of the most influential designers’ designers, while remaining exactly who she is, becoming a doting mom, and proudly showing off the neighborhood she comes from. Cheers to all of that, Martine.

Source: Vogue

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Fall 2020 Menswear Art School

Slow, proud, and graceful, they emerged from the smoke-licked back of the runway. Their feet were bare but for powdered chalk, their eyes painted red or contact-lensed to be pupil-less. A piano’s soaring chords were engineered for emotion. One model in a pair of high-rise tailored trousers had his chest hair artfully styled to spell out Art School.

I hadn’t seen an Art School show since back in its boundary breaking MAN days in 2017, and on the face of it this one was consistent with its original Theo Adams–choreographed formula of unrepentantly celebratory dramatics: We’re LGBTQ+ and if you don’t like it, bad luck. Personally, I like it; however, between 2017 and now it feels like representation of non-cis sexualities—thanks much to Art School and others—is rightly well established in, if not the wider world, then certainly in the narrow realm of runway fashion. The ceiling that Art School once railed against has been rightfully shattered.

This means that the inherent subversive tension that imbued the original shows feels diluted. Thankfully, the real business of this business—you know, clothes—was well served when you looked beyond the chest hair. The press release spoke of a collaboration with the wonderful artist Maggi Hambling, but sadly this was hard to detect. Yet what did uplift were some of the garments: The slashed outerwear was tempered by some quite beautifully executed non-razored pieces that were transgressive in this context for being clothes that any unreconstructed norm with a sense of taste would, could, and should rightly hanker after. The same applied to the button-up dress that both prefaced (in black) and postscript-ed (in white) the show.

Source: Vogue

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Charles Jeffrey Loverboy Fall 2020 Menswear

“It was a modern-day Scottish sacrifice,” said Charles Jeffrey at the beginning of his show debrief. There was an installation of a hollowed-out tree hung with CDs and topped by a disco ball silhouetted against the dark on a platform at the end of his runway—a place for the ritual propitiation of the ancient, abused forces of nature. So it seemed, as his characters came and went, some dressed in costumes hung with horse brasses and sporting huge equine quiffs, others in Loverboy tartans, and still more in pannier dresses. Another sect looked like a cult of eco-paganists clinging together in their own dance of lament.

Let’s leave the narratives aside for a minute. What you see in these show pictures, shorn of surrounding context, is a clear view of his most accomplished, extensive setting out of his stall as a designer yet. Jeffrey has traversed that stage of his career where he’s presented generalized symbolic statements and reached a point where his tailoring fits impressively and sexily, starting with a teal all-in-one trompe l’oeil suit. His waisted, puff-shouldered jackets, flared asymmetric suits, and tartan trousers have magnetic swagger, and he’s gathered in a put-together softness in flower-sprigged prints. Good dresses. Great coats. Fun, bright Loverboy-fanboy sweaters and jersey polos.

There was a two-sided press release with this show. On one, a swirling, free-associative Scottish reel through folk tradition, art inspirations, and reimagined Glaswegian youth culture, undercut with intergenerational anger: “An older, hidden generation have made brutal calculations, and we’ve inherited their catastrophe.” On the other was his densely printed “Manifesto For Conscious Practice,” which contained the most salient takeaway. “We are working every day to improve our processes and working practices to ensure that we mindfully and with accountability respect our environment as much as we respect the people on whom the brand relies,” it began. “As part of this drive we are continuing to place equal value on human wellbeing alongside financial growth.”

Performing and costuming a fashion show confrontation with dystopian ecological disaster is one thing—many fashion shows have an undertow of this today. It’s another matter to actually do something concrete about it. Jeffrey is making that effort. Having gathered his team to study the weekly online sustainability course offered by the London College of Fashion, he is establishing better practices.

For Jeffrey, it goes beyond choosing to use GOTS-certified cotton, cutting down on chemical processes, and using recyclable plastic in packaging. “I think it’s about localism,” he said. “It’s about making sure that with the people you hire, that you’re giving them opportunity and training them. In a logistical way, too, it’s making sure that nothing transports too far, that fabrics are sourced nearby; that our teams go out to the factories we use to make sure the standards are okay.”

It was localism which circled him back to his Scottish roots for this collection. “I visited the Orkney islands and witnessed this pagan ceremony which has been going on for over 200 years. It’s a pageant that’s all about loving nature, amongst the rural families that live there.” The Horse Ceremony of Orkney involves ploughing contests and elaborate hand-crafted costumes. Their influences permeated the mad Teddy Boy horse-mane quiffs, the leather harnesses, and the lines of pom-pom, heart-shaped embroideries. Traveling on to Glasgow, he studied Margaret Mackintosh’s arts and crafts flower drawings.

Back to nature, again. Charles Jeffrey is a responsibility-taker and a realist; he didn’t hold back on acting out the doom he and his younger employees fear in this show. But he’s nevertheless a romantic, and a leader too. That must give those who work for him a rallying, optimistic sense of fun and purpose, even as they put on a show warning of impending disaster.

Source: Vogue

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Pre-Fall 2020 Menswear Louis Vuitton

For a guy as collab-happy as Virgil Abloh—last month the Louvre released images of the collection he created for its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition—his Louis Vuitton tenure has been remarkably light on partnerships. Abloh says that’s intentional. “I wanted to start off without collaborations, so people could see my point of view on the brand,” he explains. But 18 months after his debut, LV’s artistic director of menswear is ready to commit. Abloh has exclusively shared with Vogue that he’s teamed up with his friend Nigo, the Japanese streetwear pioneer and founder of A Bathing Ape, on a capsule collection to be released mid-2020.

“Me being at Louis Vuitton is directly attributable to work Nigo’s done in the past,” Abloh reflects. “A collab project with him—it puts his work in the right context. He inspired me to do what I do. I thought it was a full-circle moment.” Indeed, when Abloh was hired at Vuitton, Nigo called it “a victory for our team, the streetwear crowd.”

There are no pictures of the collaboration just yet, but if Abloh’s latest collection for the Paris house is any indication, the capsule will be heavy on logos. For pre-fall, fanny packs feature supersize LVs in an unfinished embroider-by-numbers design and the familiar canvas monogram has been disrupted with what look like streaks of colorful tape, only rendered in inlaid leather. “Only at a house like LV can you take a quote-unquote student idea and make it trompe l’oeil into beautifully crafted versions,” Abloh says.

As for the clothes, Abloh put his fingerprints on the famous monogram in any number of ways: enlarging it on a mink bomber and cotton separates, mashing it up with camouflage and jacquard, and quilting it onto lightweight puffer jackets. The surprise is Abloh’s new tailoring, which has a more to-the-body, even formal silhouette. “When I started at Louis Vuitton I was interested in relaxed luxury, oversized, [the idea] that luxury didn’t need to be stiff, and I’ve made that point,” he says. In other words, we should expect more of these streamlined fits on his fall 2020 runway next month. And the famous mid-layer garments, too. Abloh says they’re connecting with customers beyond the red carpet. “They reinforce my goal of defining a silhouette.”

Source: Vogue

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Stefan Cooke Fall 2020 Menswear

Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt called their collection, rather ominously, The End. The words were painted on a handbag like movie credits. The set—empty chairs and music stands—suggested a hall just after an orchestra has left post-recital. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the two of them were looking back and feeling the reverberations of everything they’ve made and achieved since they graduated from Central Saint Martins MA in 2017.

“With the end of the decade, we felt like we were ushering out the old,” said Cooke, “and this is the new version of what we do.” Burt chimed in: “Or maybe more professional, in a way.” Well, not so fast. Cooke and Burt have invented much which is identifiable, a configuration of skinny silhouettes and ingenious playing with classic British staples like argyle patterns, tweeds, and funny forms of chain mail, for starters. None of that felt old at all in this show. The trick in any young designer’s career is knowing how to capitalize on signatures.

Growing up and struggling with the reality of business means they may be feeling different from the heady days of shooting out of college on a rush of ideas and adrenaline. Nevertheless, if they’re focusing on balancing creativity and wearability, they made a good job of it. The boyish quirky-chic of the pierced and slashed harlequin knits—first of all made into scarves—was joined by new takes on Fair Isle sweaters. The idea of a yoked neckline flowed over into the slash-neck coat-jacket shapes; a neat way of making old English checks less dad-like (with some mini kilts as accessories).

Now, the super-skinny Cooke legs are encased in real denim, not trompe l’oeil printed legging-jeans, and that was a stride forward. It’s the result of a collaboration with Lee Jeans, which gave Cooke a free hand with printing, studding, and grommeting with jeans and jackets. A commercial brand relationship, then. Surely this is the beginning of a new chapter, rather than an end.

Source: Vogue

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E. Tautz Fall 2020 Menswear

“Fashion, a world of consumption and destruction that heaps misery upon human beings and reaps damage on the planet on a scale almost no other industry comes close to matching.” Phew. It’s fair to say that Patrick Grant sounded pretty agonized in this E. Tautz collection’s press release. Happily, that agony resulted in a 26-look set of clothes that prompted, well, if not quite ecstasy, then certainly something much improved upon misery.

Grant is a designer whose refined throwback sensibility—Savile Row 2.0.2.0—very often results in beautifully silhouetted and fabricated menswear which sometimes skates perilously over the thin ice of anachronism. Here we saw it again in a collection that combined hints of lubricious decadence (especially the sexy, luxe-trashy asymmetrically paneled Louboutin pumps over tube socks) with wide-eyed schoolboy Englishness (or at least Edinburgh-flavored Englishness) in surgically cut post-Oxford bags and matchy-matchy tropical twill chinos and blousons.

As shoehorned-in via that opening quote, however, the emphasis here was on sustainability. About 50% of the collection Grant reckoned was made from repurposed fabrics, much of it provided by Astco, an industrial recycler whose boss happens to be a Grant bespoke client at Norton & Sons and who pitched in with the denim and shirting. Then there was the darning and patching, executed by students from the Royal College of Needlework (also an often-time collaborator of Sarah Burton’s). This saw irregular check patches insinuated upon herringbone outerwear, or herringbone patches upon check suiting, or layers of differently washed denim patched onto denim. In the suiting especially it was interesting, adding a depth of patina and pentimento, a roughness, to that most surface-defined of menswear genres.

Backstage Grant railed like a Shakespearean lead with a BBC reality show contract about the conflicting instincts that mutual fealty to fashion and ecological survival stir up, then disclosed he has started darning his clothes, which in turn prompted a very senior and glamorous Hearst editor to disclose that she now darns her pantyhose (is Hearst in trouble?). The fundamental point about E. Tautz is that if you like it then buy it because the quality is superb. You will wear it until you, not it, are due for recycling. Unless we all decide to go naked, that’s about as ecologically sound as fashion can be.

Source: Vogue

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