Loewe Spring 2021 Menswear

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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

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Junya Watanabe Spring 2021 Menswear

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Junya Watanbe Spring 2021 Menswear Vogue Fashionado

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

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Homme Plissé Issey Miyake Spring 2021 Menswear

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“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

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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.

JW Anderson Spring 2021 Menswear Vogue Runway Fashionado

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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Engineered Garments Spring 2021 Menswear

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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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DIOR MEN SPRING 2021

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The electric acclaim Kim Jones has brought to Dior Men since he took the reins in 2018 has centered on the buzzy atmosphere of large-scale runway shows—six of them, already, in two years. Needless to say, with runway congregations ruled out, everything’s very different in the summer of 2020, but that didn’t prevent today’s collaboration between Jones and the 36-year-old Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, whose stunning huge-scale portraits of Black subjects—partly richly finger-painted—have a skyrocketing reputation in the contemporary art world. “It’s a portrait of an artist who I greatly admire,” Jones said. “[The gallerist] Mera Rubell introduced me to Amoako last year in Miami. I really loved his work and wanted to work with him because of my own links to Africa. He lives between Vienna, where he studied, Ghana, and Chicago. So we sat down and discussed.”

The first results—a collection fusing Boafo’s art with Dior artisanship, a look book, and a documentary film shot at the artist’s studio in Accra and at Jones’ home in London—are launched in a more intimate, in-depth, and, dare we say, intelligent way than could possibly have come across in front of the usual roar of the crowd and show hustle of the Paris collections. One of the unexpected upsides of the enforced break from fashion-as-usual is watching how communication is suddenly transitioning from image to information—from silent screen to talkies. That’s a breakthrough.

So, here we were at 2:30 p.m. for the worldwide laptop Dior Men premiere, watching and hearing Boafo in his studio in Ghana as he paints and describes how he captures friends and family, “and people who create spaces for others to exist.” He speaks about the flat colors he uses to silhouette his figures, and, he explains, “how fashion inspires my work. I tend to look at characters who have that sense of style.” Friends hanging at Boafo’s place are wearing pieces from the collection, and the artist is working in a faded-wallpaper print Dior Men shirt, whose pattern has bounced back in a creative arc from portrait to garment.

The collection is smaller and more edited than it would have been. Jones was working out of his Notting Hill house with a small team and long distance with Dior ateliers in France to get it done over the past months. The result: clothes saturated with uplifting color and print, which pinpoint Boafo’s signatures within the language the designer has established for Dior Men. Later in the video Jones is interviewed on camera in his home studio, speaking about how a visual connection gelled when he saw Boafo’s portrait of a boy in a green beret and a ivy-print shirt: “Ivy was one of Monsieur Dior’s symbols.”

Celebrating and platforming Boafo’s work for a luxury fashion market meant, among other things, transferring the tactile energy of his finger-painted heads into two intensely embroidered sweaters. The pattern from a semi-sheer fil coupé jacquard shirt sprang from a close-up Jones had taken of Boafo’s brush work. He also lifted subtle inspiration from haute couture—the gray taffeta blouson being a renewed, more youthful and summery iteration of the opera coat which opened his last show.

Still, even without the Black Lives Matter uprising which is fundamentally changing the way all institutions are being interrogated now, a collaboration like this was always going to demand detailed explanation. This one is tooled differently from the usual artist-brand collab. Behind it is an exchange with Dior which was stipulated by Boafo. “He said he didn’t want a royalty [for himself], but help to build a foundation for young artists in Accra,” Jones said. A donation made by Christian Dior (the sum was not specified) backs up Boafo’s activism. In using the leverage of his market power to lift up African art and artists, he is one of the new generation of Black artists (Virgil Abloh and Stormzy being two others) who believe in the transformative empowerment of cultural education. In May, Boafo raised $190,000 (three times the estimate) with an online auction of his painting, Aurore Iradukunda, to benefit the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

The initiative will consist of a building that will host Boafo’s studio, a residence, and an artist-run gallery, supporting young artists in Ghana and their studio practice. “The change needed right now is to support young people through college and training to give everyone equal opportunities,” Jones said. The focus of this project is close to his heart, and, he says, to part of his own upbringing as the son of a hydrogeologist who worked throughout the continent. “We moved to Ethiopia when I was around three years old, spent time living there, and then moved around east Africa and then Botswana. I’ve kept going back for the rest of my life.”

Underlying his motivation—using Dior’s fashion broadcasting capabilities to enlighten a broad audience about the vitality of contemporary African art, as well as facilitating a project with cash—is a quieter salute to Jones’s father, who recently passed away. “The fact that we are working with Amoako Boafo, from Ghana, which was one of my father’s favorite African countries is,” he said, “a fitting tribute to the man who introduced me to Africa and the world.”

Source: VogueRunway

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VIKTOR & ROLF HAUTE COUTURE A/W 2020

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Viktor & Rolf Haute Couture, Autumn/Winter 2020 titled “Change” features three wardrobes for three mindsets in extraordinary times of change. Viktor & Rolf subvert the traditional catwalk by showcasing this collection in a special haute couture presentation. The collection consists of three different mini-wardrobes, each symbolizing a different state of mind. Each wardrobe has three outfits: a nightgown, a dressing gown and a coat.

The first wardrobe embodies a somber mood. The satin nightgown sports intricate lace incrustations with a raincloud motif. The grey chenille dressing gown has an intricate bow and extra long sleeves. The look is completed with a majestic coat in animal-friendly faux-leather. Its volume and cone motif does impress and emanates a safe feeling. The look is finished with a face mask accessory.

The second group of outfits signals the conflicting emotions we all experience these days. The nightgown is manically decorated with a polka dot motif of contradictory emojis, each symbolizing a state of mind. Its accompanying dressing gown has asymmetric sashes and bows down the left sleeve. A maximalist asymmetric coat in pink and yellow 'pleather' with glittery accents completes this manic mini wardrobe. Its generous A-line volume guarantees you will remain in your own safe zone while venturing out into the world. The abstract decoration of holes and tunnels is at the same time unapproachable as well as attractive, an effect that is emphasized by the color clash of pinks and yellows.

The last three ensembles radiate love for Autumn/Winter 2020. Red, black and white lace incrustations in a white satin nightgown are used to the opposite effect as before: melancholy becomes serenity. The dressing gown has a snug bodice and an important skirt, featuring two heart shaped pockets in quilted red satin. The finale coat in white faux leather features the heart symbol that shows unity. Illustrating that we all deserve to be loved, regardless of age, color, gender, race, religion or sexuality, it is adorned with dozens of glittering hearts.

The film is directed by Marijke Aerden, narrated by MIKA and shot on location in the Waldorf Astoria in Amsterdam. The 'Change' animation is realised by Studio Maan Bijster. Concept and text by Viktor & Rolf.

“The world around us is changing rapidly. Whether apocalypse or new spiritual era, you will continue to be able to step into the singular universe of spectacular beauty, unexpected elegance and spiritual glamour of Viktor & Rolf.”

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