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

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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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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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Giambattista Valli Fall 2020 Couture

“If they’re coming to me, they want the best of me.” That was Giambattista Valli earlier today on a Zoom call from Paris, hours before his fall 2020 haute couture collection would be unveiled via a video starring Joan Smalls. True to his word, the new collection is signature Giamba. There’s no COVID-time second-guessing of his instincts—no economizing on silk tulle or scaling back of faille and taffeta bows. If anything, the tulle tiers are frothier, the bows more voluminous. A face-covering mask could’ve been a nod to the pandemic, but in black chiffon it was more decorative than functional.

Smalls models the collection’s 18 looks in the video, and in the split-screen next to her, scenes of Paris in winter are revealed. “With or without us, nature was going on,” Valli remarked of the months we spent under lockdown. “In the horror of what we’re passing through, there was beauty blooming at the same time.” On day one of this digital couture week, nature is a recurring motif, as is the human desire to get out into it. It may be irrational exuberance on our parts, but it is exuberance which is better than its opposite, and after months of restrictions, this kind of pleasure seeking is hardly a surprise. Even before the collection made its online debut, Valli had two virtual orders. “Happy times are never going to be démodé,” he said. He also has the advantage of a very young clientele; “they’re used to buying on the web,” he added.

As his bride (see gallery above), Smalls wears a strapless dress of ruched ivory tulle decorated with a pair of black bows that match the one that accents her cathedral-length veil of polka-dot embroidered tulle. Valli was eager to highlight the couture techniques of each piece—from a sequin minidress and its many-layered point d’esprit cape to a white ballgown decorated neckline to hem in lipstick-red feathers—and he proudly announced he was able to retain all of his employees during the shutdown and the reopening that’s followed. Amidst this ongoing crisis, that really is cause for happy times.

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

FALL 2020 PRADA MENSWEAR

As a swelling and ominous bass obscured heroic but fading trumpets the lights came up over a Prada set that closely resembled one of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. There were two bare but Palladian-proportioned arched piazzas; in the middle of each was the statue of a man on a horse on a podium—classic 19th-century masculine heroism.

Except, naturally, not quite. The horse and rider were constructed like those cardboard dinosaur statues for kids, from insertable, flat, anonymizing sections. Said Mrs. Prada in her post show debrief: “I wanted an equestrian statue, but of course equestrian is not politically correct, so I told Rem [Koolhaas], ‘Let’s do an equestrian that is totally non-heroic.’”

Which allows us to canter on to the clothes. These were bookended between the bare-armed tank top looks at the top and high notch-collared two-button topcoats at the end: two particularly Prada-ish chapters in the recent masculine narrative of dress. Between them, even if Mrs. Prada indicated it wasn’t the intention, we seemed to take a survey of various professionally specific styles of dress seen through a house eye. There were young executives in three-piece suits or mismatched tailored separates, portfolios thrust between arm and hip, in different volumes of jacket. We transitioned to rural worker in mid-calf boots and oversized corduroy jacket, then onto a more urban kind of Prada hipster freelancer combination of the previous two categories that mixed elements from both and inserted some technical touches and piped sport raised graphics on pocket flaps. Two Macintosh-like rubberized coats matched with baggy pants tucked into beaten leather galvanized sole boots (plus rectangular lensed shades) were a little scientist-fights-contagion. Following those was an absolutely wicked green half-length coat that seemed particularly fashion show reviewer.

De-formalized top-to-toe cotton day pajamas with small ruffled bibs and some great treated shearlings followed. We arrived at those last two topcoats via a series of knits and silks patterned with punchily-colored gridded graphics whose palette nodded to the earlier separates and seemed related to the lavender and olive shapes on the set. They also shared something with the (Google searched in the back of the car) fabric patterns associated with Koloman Moser and other artists of the Vienna Secession (mentioned in an aside by Mrs. Prada during the treasure hunt chat at the end).

“Let me say what’s the point of this show,” she obligingly added: “That in the big—not ‘confusion’—but the complication of the current time between the world going wrong or going better, the discussion on sexes, on surviving or not… I thought to give an indication that the only thing that makes me calm and optimistic is to give value to work… to give value to things that matter in your life and your work. And so the creativity is mixed with technicalities, which is a little bit similar to the Secessionist period when ideas, creativity, and actual work had to be all together.” And going back to that post-triumphant equine statue, was this also about the nature of contemporary heroism? “Not heroic, but heroes… I want to give a hope that in this casino [translation: chaotic world] if you do well your job, paired with intelligence, and with culture, then this already is something… It’s to give respect to work, to effort, to fatigue, and to what is difficult.”

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

Brioni Fall 2020 Menswear Collection

The 15th-century salons and ballroom of the Palazzo Gerini were so darkened at this Pitti presentation—the chandeliers were switched off and draped with tattered muslin, and the only light sources were artificial candles clustered in corners—that at first you could barely see the marbled floors, the lush paintings, the Gabbiani frescoes, and certainly not the Brioni clothes. But as your eyes slowly adjusted to the dimness, what was clear as day was the music. Brioni’s design director Norbert Stumpfl and the evening’s mise-en-scène manager Olivier Saillard had between them recruited some of the world’s finest male classical musicians, dressed them in Brioni, and then left them to it.

Thus in the Palazzo’s Sala Gialla, father and son cellists Andreas and Ingemar Brantelid (of the Royal Danish Orchestra) sat between the two long muslin-covered dining tables in the near darkness playing Tchaikovsky variations. Andreas’s instrument was a Stradivarius later observed to be worth probably more than the Palazzo: They both wore evening jackets, the son’s shawl-collared, the father’s silk and double-breasted with wide (11.5cm, Stumpfl specified later) reveres.

In another room, the star Greco-Peruvian soloist Alexandros Kapelis swayed behind his grand piano as just a few of us stood in the inky salon to be saturated in a Debussy arabesque. He wore classic pianist attire: black tailcoat and trousers in wool Barathea and a white cotton dress shirt.

The most populated chamber was the White Room, or Sala Bianca, in which an eight-strong baroque ensemble led by Andrea Lucchi of Rome’s Orchestra Santa Cecilia on trumpet did stirring justice to two pieces by Purcell, and another by Handel. Double bassist Ulrich Wolff of the Berlin Philharmonic looked rather louche alongside his more formally attired colleagues in piped silk pajamas and a cashmere dressing gown—apparently he was also wearing two pairs of (non-Brioni) long johns for fear of a chill. On cello, Professor David Pia of the Conservatory of Geneva (who looked a little like the Dutch soccer striker Robin van Persie) had shed his mink scarf; his double-breasted mouline wool suit and herringbone jacquard cashmere sweater were insulation enough.

And so it went on, for seven beautiful rooms in total. At the chat afterwards Stumpfl revealed some crazily beautiful details. The almost punkishly animated string trio in the final Azzura room were all wearing decorative jacquard jackets whose fabric had been woven in Venice on a loom dating back to the 1600s. One white cashmere coat was not colored thus, but was sourced from the wool of an albino goat. “We do this to show we can do it,” Stumpfl expanded, “but the clothes are quite simple, quite basic.” By this he did not mean Old Navy basic (oh no), but canonically classic. “For me it’s, ‘I see the man and I don’t really see the clothes.’ ”

That might seem like an obtuse, or even counter-intuitive statement. Because who is going to buy an albino cashmere jacket (with albino horn buttons to boot) and not want it visible? The answer is the sort of unassuming mega-zillionaire—titans of industry, tech, entertainment, or lucky guys who got left a lot of money—who are classically inclined: men who want to wear their success but not have it wear them.

Brioni was at Pitti this season to mark its 75th anniversary. One of the most significant moments in its history happened here in Florence in 1952 when a debonair gentleman named Angelo Vitucci modeled Brioni’s Roman suiting for an audience of mostly American womenswear buyers at Palazzo Pitti. This was the first ever menswear fashion show, and also helped the brand crack a U.S. market (partly also thanks to the enthusiasm of famous customers including John Wayne) that has remained important to the brand ever since.

Tonight Brioni could have homaged that iconic moment much more directly, but instead chose a route more subtle, more refined, and truer to what Stumpfl is working to articulate at this Abruzzo-based house. Florence is perhaps the densest repository of European culture there is, and here he was reminding us—in a modest but undeniable manner—that Brioni is a part of this continent’s myriad mosaic of creativity and invention. This was an exercise in both deep luxury and profound culture that was beautiful to be immersed in.

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

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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