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

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

FASHIONADO

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

FASHIONADO

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

FASHIONADO

The Best Street Style from Pitti Uomo Fall/Winter 2020

Menswear fashion season is in full swing and is not slowing down! Right now all eyes are on the stylish Pitti Uomo and GQ Magazine captured some of the best streetstylers on the block. What we love personally about Pitti style is that the dapper dudes making headlines are real men in their 30s, 40s, 50s+ showing off their badass, trendsetting sense of style… take note boys.

The fashion marathon marches on. The menswear world has migrated from avant-garde-heavy London to the traditionalist-packed Fortezza de Basso in Florence, Italy. For a few days, the fort plays home to Pitti Uomo, the industry's most significant trade show. It also plays home to the planet's gnarliest devotees of tailoring. That means the famous Pitti peacocks, of course, but it also means guys who are invested in finding new and different ways to wear soft-shouldered blazers, colorful suits, and shoes that aren't sneakers. It's basically the Olympics of street style—and these are our favorite looks so far.

Source: GQ

FASHIONADO

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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