Engineered Garments Spring 2021 Menswear

How do you make clothing with purpose in a time that feels so purposeless? For 20 years, Daiki Suzuki’s Engineered Garments has labored to eliminate effort in menswear, building flak vests and cargo pants that do the work for their wearer through functional fabrications and an abundance of details like straps, pockets, snaps, and zips. Now, with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no need for those dozens of pockets, what kind of engineering did Suzuki get up to at his flagship brand?

The answer, he wrote in a press release, has less to do with the science of garment making and more to do with the joy that clothing can bring into one’s life: “One word came to mind when thinking about this: décontracté, which is to say casual poise while maintaining a level of comfort and relaxation. To me it meant focusing on designing more casual styles, while still incorporating military-inspired details.”

Instead of bundled and tactical, the models in Engineered Garments’s spring 2021 look book appear carefree, unrestricted by their clothes. Through a global array of materials and patterns, ranging from Indian florals and madras to Breton stripes, as well as lightweight, elegant polyester twills and nylon-cotton blends, Suzuki fashioned lively clothing that alleviates stress. French army pants and jackets came in slouchy silhouettes, with a new drawstring trouser in a pintuck plaid that epitomizes EG’s workwear-as-loungewear proposition this season. There were also new “overpants”—think of them as even bigger, baggier pants that can be worn over other trousers or the brand’s summery printed shorts.

If you must leave the house, an olive ripstop trench with no shortage of buttons and belts will offer the protection from the outside world we are all desiring. (Perhaps pair it with a new bucket hat featuring, of course, a pocket on its side.) A collaboration with K-Way birthed outerwear, coveralls, and hats in packable nylon. The basket weave dobby fabric of Suzuki’s tailoring shimmered on the screen of my laptop Zoom, but don’t let the festive styling fool you. Engineered Garments’s clothing is still doing a lot of work for its wearers. This season’s job is spreading some good vibes.

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

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Christian Dior Fall 2020 Couture

There was no traffic jam on the rue de Varenne, no walk through the Rodin Museum, no scrum of street style photographers waiting in its Garden of Orpheus, and certainly no giant tent behind it. Le confinement made the staging of a Christian Dior haute couture show and the experiencing of its grand rituals impossible. Instead, last Friday, Maria Grazia Chiuri was booked solid with Zoom calls. “It’s our first couture presentation online, so it’s something very unusual,” she said.

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Chiuri enlisted her friend Matteo Garrone, the Italian filmmaker who directed last year’s Pinocchio, to create a short surrealist movie titled Le Mythe Dior. With no runway to design for, Chiuri’s concept for the season was Théâtre de la Mode. In 1945, amid the devastation of World War II and with materials in short supply, Paris designers created clothes for doll forms one-third the size of their human female counterparts. Miniature dresses and tailleurs by 60 French couturiers and their mannequins were displayed at the Louvre and the exhibition was such a marvel—the clothes and accessories were made with such exacting care, with functioning buttons and handbags filled with tiny wallets and powder compacts—it went on to tour the world, raising funds for French war survivors in the process.

During the Zoom preview, Chiuri’s creations were displayed in a prodigious trunk on mannequins, which is how Dior couture clients around the globe will engage with them. Like the “Théâtre de la Mode” wonders of 75 years ago, Chiuri’s scaled-down day looks and gowns were painstakingly made. They truly give the term petite mains new meaning, but she reported that the task this season brought her team and the Dior studio workers—all working from home and all connecting via phone call or video conference during the shutdown—a lot of joy. “The project was very positive,” she said. “Seeing the first prototype, there was a strong spirit of community.” Doll-size clothes are fairly irresistible, as Garrone’s fantasia aims to demonstrate—even a statue can’t resist their allure. But the rewards of satisfying work can’t be underestimated and the movie’s scenes of Dior artisans and seamstresses lovingly filmed working behind the scenes are equally compelling. Amidst the crushing unemployment of COVID-19 time, even more so.

Chiuri’s “muses” this season seem chosen with that notion in mind. On the call she name-checked the likes of Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and Jacqueline Lamba—20th-century women who are often remembered by history for their beauty or for their famous lovers and husbands, but in fact did important work of their own as artists. Chiuri’s own work for Dior is unmistakable, even at one-third size: The diaphanous gowns—in embroidered tulle, in pleated chiffon, in meticulously patch-worked pastel lace—are fairy tales come to life.

In Le Mythe Dior, couriers bring a trunk of shrunken clothes to the woods. In this fairy tale, the magic that transforms them into real garments is the couture atelier, and the nymphlike protagonists get to keep the dresses. Reality intrudes, though. The narrowness of the film’s cast illustrates that when it comes to fashion and the inclusiveness of intersectional feminism, there’s work yet to be done.

Source: Vogue

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