Saint Laurent SS 2021 Menswear

Breaking free of the fashion week calendar, Saint Laurent has opted to showcase its Spring/Summer 2021 Men’s collection independent of the industry. As such, “NO MATTER HOW LONG THE NIGHT IS” stands free of the fashion week churn, encouraging viewers to get lost in its inviting textures and timeless tailoring.

Intended to live as both a “virtual and physical experience,” art director Anthony Vaccarello has overseen the rollout of videos, AR clips, 3D lenticular images, curated playlists, flags, posters and more alongside the seasonal garment design, delivering a well-rounded presentation. At its core, however, the Spring/Summer 2021 range is all about quiet opulence, shrouding bomber jackets, coats, blazers and ankle-length shirts in lush patterns and rich fabrication.

Plush faux fur invites a playful touch while short-sleeved Western shirts are emblazoned with rocky patterns that could easily blend into the landscape of the American West. Saint Laurent’s signature skinny ties and silhouette-shrinking jeans are offered in classic black varients, but there are also new styles ideal for a louche look; deeply pleated pants, sleeveless tunic shirts and strappy gladiator-style sandals yield a new twist on warm weather effervescence.

Source: Hypebeast

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Sacai Spring 2021 Menswear

One of the delights of a Sacai show is discovering which historical figure or fictional character or vaunted institution Chitose Abe chooses to quote. In January, it was Albert Einstein (“I believe in intuition”) and a year ago it was Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski (“the rug really tied the room together”); even The New York Times got the Sacai treatment several seasons back. The pandemic made Abe’s July trip from Tokyo to Paris to present her men’s spring and women’s resort collections an impossibility, but the lockdown didn’t prevent a new collaboration. 

This season, she partnered with the American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who gave Abe permission to use the phrase “Love Over Rules”; it features in his neon light installations and in a gothic font on Sacai’s new T-shirts and parkas. Thomas dedicated the San Francisco installation of Love Over Rules to his cousin, who died suddenly in 2000; apparently the words were lifted from his last voice message to the artist. Over Zoom, Abe explained that “even before the coronavirus situation, I believed in this idea. No matter your race, culture, or sexuality, love overrules.”

Due to Japan’s COVID-19 lockdown, Abe worked on this collection from home. “It allowed me to think about the things I loved about past collections,” she said. This new one features many of her favorite archival fabrics mashed-up to create tank tops, pajama shirts, wrap skirts, and long, loose shirt dresses. The linings of the “Love Over Rules” jackets are lively patchworks of the different prints. Abe is one of the few designers with a distinctive enough point of view to make this sort of nostalgizing a viable formula. 

The lookbook has a “Sacai for real life” vibe; Abe wanted to portray how she actually wears her clothes: not in “full looks,” but rather with her Nike leggings or her APC jeans. That jibes nicely with our more circumscribed daily routines. Still, she’s hoping she’ll be back in Paris with her next collection. “Even if it’s just 10 minutes long, being able to create that experience and environment is really important to me,” she says. “I’m preparing so that I can if the opportunity arises.”

Source: VogueRunway

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JW Anderson Spring 2021 Menswear

Jonathan Anderson’s spring 2021 men’s and resort 2021 women’s collections will go down in memory as the show in a box. As a moment in the Lockdown Collections of 2020, this was the sweetest and most original intervention so far, a blend of digital and tactile, craft-y and clever, in a package that came to the doors of critics, and had us unwrapping it like children. Mmm...what is this?

Inside a fabric wrapping were cards printed with the photos you see here, and a little sheaf of fabric swatches to feel. Scatterings of pressed flowers dropped out between pages. There were paper masks printed with boys’ faces—the ones Anderson propped up on the mannequins in his photos. Tiny orange cards with mottoes on them slipped out: “Never compromise,” read one. “Keep looking up,” on another. And, “The future is unwritten.” Inside another little box was a set of insanely delicious brownies, topped with an edible layer of real pansies and marigolds.

Contrast how this launch of Anderson’s collection would have gone under pre-pandemic circumstances. He’d be in Paris for his men’s show, and everyone would be going through the ghastly backstage ritual that’s developed—jostling with each other in an unseemly and impatient manner, shoving smartphones in designers’ faces, shouting questions, and breathing over one another. In spite of the cataclysm that brought it about, how much more human, civilized, and thought-provoking was the sight of Anderson unpacking the box and calmly, unhurriedly explaining its contents on a video for the world to see?

“I’m surprised we even had a collection!” he said, in a one-to-one Zoom call from his studio. “It was like going back to university days, when you can’t get a model, and you have to do everything yourself, at home with a mannequin in your bedroom. And I really enjoyed it. It felt like a collection made in real time. I realized through it that I’ve never wanted to make things more, to be more creative.”

The ability to tune in to the emotion of the zeitgeist is Anderson’s incredibly accurate superpower. A long time ago, he intuited that people would be starting to relate to handmade things—and exactly how spot-on that’s proved to be. His own patchwork, knitted cardigan, as once worn by Harry Styles, has become a peak-craft-wave TikTok phenomenon across continents. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Fans, everywhere, making their own versions! It’s a hand-knit that’s no longer sold, but we’ve just given the pattern away for free,” says Anderson.

If ever there was an endorsement of the joy fashion can bring in dark times, that surely was it. “Early on,” he remembers, “I went through those defeatist weeks, when you question what you’re doing with fashion, what’s its purpose? I think everyone who’s involved in fashion has felt that. But I do believe fashion is always an important mirror of the times. It reflects the trials and tribulations of the age. So with this box that we’ve sent out, I imagined it being put on a bookshelf, and someone else picking it up years later, and these things dropping out: this record of where we were, right now.”

What historians will be studying hence in these two collections is the resurgence of playful resilience in difficult circumstances, the making the best of what already exists. Lots of patchwork coats, gigantic pockets, pom-pom trims; capes made from chopped-up trench coats and military parkas; brocades and faded wallpaper prints. In the resort collection, lovely bias-cut 1930s dresses (a carryover from his thoughts about glamour from the seasons before), with trailing trumpet sleeves and “wings.”

A line in his press notes described the poignant feeling of optimism against the odds that he wanted to put across: “A sentiment of youthful, freewheeling amusement composedly comes to the fore.” The uplifting little messages he sent out on those cards came, he said, from all the comforting things he remembers people close to him saying on calls over the past few months: “You know, talking to my parents, people saying, ‘It’ll get better soon.’” One of them read, “The end is the beginning.”

Will there ever be shows again, as they were? Maybe not. But in this limbo time, how much better does fashion feel when it’s not rushed, pressured, and hysterical? And how grateful are we to designers like Jonathan Anderson who are thinking up new ways to spark pleasure in thinking about clothes? Today, very.

Source: VogueRunway

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