Rick Owens Spring 2021 Menswear

Titled “Phlegethon,” after the river of molten fire that Dante said swept the agonized damned through the seventh circle, this collection was previewed by Rick Owens from his place at the Venice Lido. Down the Zoom he appeared moist and was topless: “I just got out of the water. It is beautiful. Delicious.”

Both in Italy and France, the Big Picture has been shifting in a more positive direction of late—working upstream, not drifting down—and this was, Owens said, one of the contributing factors to a sudden change of direction the day before this video presentation. Shortly after he was released from “le confinement” Owens traveled to Italy where he made not one but two collection videos. The first was for “Performa,” the fall 2020 collection he showed in January but whose distribution had since been shut down. The second, a little later, was for this collection, already mostly planned. Owens’s original scheme was to offer “Performa” once more at this digital Fashion Week.

He explained: “At the time it seemed like the smart and kind and rational and logical thing to do. I thought, ‘I can kind of press reset and start doing this from now on.’ So that was my plan. And then yesterday morning I changed my mind…because for better or for worse, the world has become accustomed to being able to see everything at the same time—the preview of what’s coming and imagery of what is available right now. My plan would have been to only be providing what was available right now, and not having what was coming. And after a while that was going to start feeling old. We’re used to seeing something that is fresh out of the oven. And I don’t think we can go back. The genie’s out of the bottle…it might seem logical, but emotionally it just doesn’t make sense.”

Owens’s team worked all last night—“I gave my people a heart attack”—to edit the video you see here of Owens fitting and styling Tyrone Dylan Susman in this new (but auto-Owens referential) collection. The format, especially when compared to the epic sweep of an Owens runway show, is, Owens agreed, intimate. He said: “Doing something spectacular and confrontational and transgressive would not have been the right thing to do now…so I showed the real action of us working on the collection, which I thought was the most genuine expression that I could come up with.”

Owens added that while mostly ensconced in his lagoon cocoon, he has been peeking out of it: “I keep talking about what Balmain did. The show on the boat. I thought that was just the loveliest thing. It was not wasteful. It was poetic. It was charming. It was fun. And what I also realized when I saw it is that a company like Balmain, or any of us, it’s almost that we have a duty to present the best of the best of what we can do…We represent excellence.”

Watching Owens and Susman parlay over “Wish I Woz a Dog” by Alien Sex Fiend, you could see both excellence and provenance in this collection. “It’s one of my favorites ever,” says Owens as they arrange what becomes look 19, an unlined jacket with quilted shoulder details inspired by his research into Larry LeGaspi. Owens said the double-layer loose leather mesh tank tops were echoes of a collection in 2012, and added that knits and swimwear were fresh expressions of the membrane T-shirt first developed for 2017’s collection “Dirt.” Said Owens: “I didn’t really do it that deliberately, but that’s how it came out. I did look back and use my own archives. Because I was in that mindset that we’re not going to throw things away.” Through their dialogue, Susman helped shape the presentation of this collection, a development of which Owens offered: “I’ve let people in a little more than I used to. I have more people that I’ll ask and listen to, whose opinion interests me…But at the same time, I am only going to be interested in a creative voice that is personal, not a committee decision. My selfishness is intact.”

Source: VogueRunway

FASHIONADO

Loewe Spring 2021 Menswear

Fashion people have been bandying about terms like ‘experiential,’ ‘immersive,’ ‘multi-platform’ and ‘digital’ for years, but only now—in the midst of the horrendous crisis of the pandemic—have creative people started breaking through the walls of all that jargon. What Jonathan Anderson orchestrated on July 12th around the launch of Loewe’s spring 2021 collection and its women’s pre-collection felt like a long-needed quantum leap into the new world of open-ended possibilities. Where would a designer who’s always talked about Loewe as ‘a cultural brand’ and his links with artists and artisans go? How can the truth of tactility and emotion be felt when no congregational live event is possible?

In a midday Zoom call, Anderson said that in the initial shock, he’d tussled with confronting how to carry on. “In the first two weeks of the lockdown, I hated being in the job I do. There’s been a couple of weeks where I’ve really struggled to know why I’m doing this; feeling powerless because you’re not saving lives, or because you’re part of a weird elite.” But then he rallied, “realizing you’re trying to save jobs through this, that there’s a whole ecosystem of families, people who’ve been making bags for generations.”

On one level, what he came up with felt like dipping into a 24-hour Jonathan Anderson-curated worldwide live summer festival of arts, crafts, and conversations on Loewe’s Instagram page and website. “My whole thing is to do something in each time zone,” he said, from his London home, around 12PM British Standard Time. The program rolled from Beijing time onwards, connecting with (amongst others) crafts-collaborators Kayo Ando, who showed the art of Shibori, paper artist Shin Tanaka from Japan and the basketweave artist Idoia Cuesta in Galicia, Spain. There was music curated by Adam Bainbridge (aka Kindness), who showcased a calming ‘medley’ comprising different versions of Finnish musician Pekka Pohjola’s Madness Subsides, performed by Park Jiha in Korea, performer and producer Starchild, French-Malagasy pianist and bandleader Mathis Picard, and American harpist Ahya Simone. Lots more roved through live chats between Anderson and the actor Josh O’Connor, and, later, a conversation with contemporary textile artists Igshaan Adams, Diedrick Brackens, Anne Low, and Josh Fraught.

And on another level, there was the Loewe Show-in-a-Box, a cache of paper-art discoveries delivered as a tactile substitute runway experience to the doorsteps of the people who’d ordinarily have trooped to Paris for the show in the Before Times. It was a grander follow-up to the JW Anderson show-box he sent around last week. This one was a large linen-covered box file. Inside was a pop-up show set, a flip-book of photos of the clothes on mannequins, a paper-pattern of one of the garments, print-outs of sunglasses to try on, textile samples, a set of paper pineapple bags and looks to stick together to make your own 3D ‘models,’ and a pamphlet listing Anderson’s art history inspirations. Slipped alongside was a packet of cut-out paper portrait silhouettes he’d had made of Loewe staff members. “I like that they’re kind of immortalized in this moment,” he said.

For Anderson, it’s been a way of honoring the people who make, the crafts that are involved, and the sea-changes in emotion being wrought in these weird times—as well as capturing it all for posterity in the form of an object, something that a 20-minute runway event never could. “For everyone who’s turned up at my shows for the past 10 years, I’d like them to say ‘Oh, this is how we dealt with it,’ instead of it being visual content that we don’t keep.”

With their sculptural volumes, twisting, looping, and wrapping forms, both collections read as Anderson’s push to convey the 3D presence of garments through the limitations of a flat, 2D medium of communication. Some of his references had been taken from El Greco and Velázquez, and his absorption of high Spanish art in the Prado in Madrid; others from his admiration of Issey Miyake’s pleats, and from wanting to showcase the painstaking handcrafts his collaborators bring. The leather-workers helped him evolve a basket-weave top and a soft, suspended bag that folds itself around one side of the body like an apron. The Japanese Shibori print radiates from the side of a tunic.

“I have actually really enjoyed this process. It has made me be way more humble about who I am in this industry,” he concluded. “If I look at before the pandemic, I was slightly struggling. I was going out to prove that we are doing something. I think what’s been good about doing this is that I’m closer to the people who make the bags, to the pattern cutter.” Holding it all together in the digital space is turning out to mean more sharing of the glory, less behind-closed-doors mystique, more proof of the humanity, time, and ingenuity that goes into making things, he believes. “I think that fashion now has to get rid of all the layers and just say, ‘This is what this brand does, and we’re going to do it with conviction.’ It has to be real. I think it’s bigger than the collection. I’m really proud of it because it’s very honest, it’s our humility. And it’s actually about finding that I love what I do.”

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

Junya Watanabe Spring 2021 Menswear

See these dudes? Get ready for who they are: Yusuke Seguchi, a master sushi chef; Taro Osamu, samurai swordsmith; Yutaro Sugitsara, professional fly-fisherman; Takaya Maki and Akira Nakamura, automobile mechanics; Masashi Hirao, bonsai master. We haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of the list of the guys—the honored experts in their fields, all over Japan—whom Junya Watanabe approached to be photographed wearing his spring 2021 men’s collection. But you get the gist. In the necessary shift away from the Paris runway format, Watanabe turned to the heroes of highly specialist traditional and technical professions he reveres. “This collection is designed for people who pursue their work with a sincere attitude all over Japan, and all over the world,” came the explanation. “People who demonstrate a certain authenticity and humility.”

Hardworking clothes for hardworking men—it’s more than a fancy fashion trope in Watanabe’s world. In an important sense, the context of the real-guy look book returns his aesthetic to its rightful roots. For years, his own work has been carving out that ideal masculine space in which the distance between fashion and authentic utilitarian workwear is absolved. Still, while the baseline items—chore jackets, workwear denims, Carhartt khakis, carpenter coats—are durable and fit for purpose, there’s an undeniable romanticism about them. In the middle of a pandemic, with so many people stuck working on screens at home, the valorization of manual skills, of men who get under cars, forge swords, and fish rivers seems all the more vividly poignant.

In his own time of confinement, Watanbe also found room to praise the cool men who uphold social life in Japan, saluting the Kobe bar owner Agobe Osamwentin and the Harajuku DJ-producer Bryan Burton-Lewis. A subtext threaded through these portraits of modern manhood was a list of books Watanabe has on his shelves. You don’t see that overtly stated in this collection, but the print and pattern he used refers to the graphic artists (and other design creatives) whose work forms his pantheon of idols. Coded and loaded with solidarity for what matters, he called this collection a “Manual.”

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake Spring 2021 Menswear

“For a future that is healthy, bright, and full of hope.” So read the closing caption at the end of an engagingly filmed and attractive collection from Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. That it was worth sticking around until the end of the credits to read said caption is down to the phone-shot footage of Plissé enthusiasts out and about, enjoying their clothes. Before that we saw three dancer models, one of whom was partnered with a basketball, demonstrate the ease the pieces afford by moving enthusiastically. A very nice touch was the suggestion that these were not only clothes you choose to put on in the morning, but also clothes that implore to be worn: They attracted the attention of the models by quivering on the rail with the same pent-up urgency my reproachfully unwalked dog demonstrated all day one of this digital Paris Fashion Week.

Among the highlights were a tracksuit in an irregular, multicolor, cityscape inspired check; robe-like coats in polyester printed in soft-toned bleach puckerings originally rendered on denim; and pieces in a mesh fabric developed to resemble a hologram. Plissé jackets included new three-quarter sleeves which Miyake’s typically comprehensive notes explained were designed to transition between the formal and casual. Two looks in top-to-toe stone tones, with low hemmed shirts, were perhaps a little cult member / spa employee, but evidently deeply relaxing to wear. Plissé pieces can be classed as both activewear and tools for attainment of serenity.

Source: VogueRunway

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