Tiger of Sweden Fall 2020 Menswear Collection

It’s a wonder he waited this long. For fall 2020 Christoffer Lundman turned Tiger’s Eye to that greatest of Swedish icons, Greta Garbo. True to his extremely thorough process, he commissioned a multi-authored book about his inspiration. This season’s took in Garbo’s early life, her Mata Hari–fueled emergence as a global object of focus, and then her fascinating elusive refusal to be subject to it: “I want to be alone.”

Really fascinating were the images of Garbo in 1971 practicing yoga on her balcony or walking to and from her handsome car while in her Klosters exile: These were shot by Ture Sjölander, the Swedish multimedia artist with whom she collaborated to seemingly promote her image as someone who rejected having an image to promote. Reportedly she proposed that Sjolander shoot a series of paparazzi-style pictures because “people seem to like them.” Later the images of Garbo included an altogether less-wanted portfolio: shots of her on the streets of New York City by Ted Leyson, a photographer who stalked the star for a decade. These proved more uncomfortable making, considering they lead to a simultaneous admiration for Garbo’s style and the non-consensual nature of the images’ creation.

And so the circle wheeled to the collection itself, which was shuttered by its own models as a statement about self image and control of it. The garments serviced self-possession too. From Scandi practical pack-a-macs to foulard shirts printed with Sweden-ized maps of New York City, these were handsome pieces in which to frame yourself. Shirting and jackets featured extra folds of fabric at the neckline to defend unwanted pap shots. The overall atmosphere shared the discreet unassuming masculinity of many of the outfits Garbo was—after her Mata Hari days at least—pictured in.

Source: Vogue

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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

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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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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

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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

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E. Tautz Fall 2020 Menswear

“Fashion, a world of consumption and destruction that heaps misery upon human beings and reaps damage on the planet on a scale almost no other industry comes close to matching.” Phew. It’s fair to say that Patrick Grant sounded pretty agonized in this E. Tautz collection’s press release. Happily, that agony resulted in a 26-look set of clothes that prompted, well, if not quite ecstasy, then certainly something much improved upon misery.

Grant is a designer whose refined throwback sensibility—Savile Row 2.0.2.0—very often results in beautifully silhouetted and fabricated menswear which sometimes skates perilously over the thin ice of anachronism. Here we saw it again in a collection that combined hints of lubricious decadence (especially the sexy, luxe-trashy asymmetrically paneled Louboutin pumps over tube socks) with wide-eyed schoolboy Englishness (or at least Edinburgh-flavored Englishness) in surgically cut post-Oxford bags and matchy-matchy tropical twill chinos and blousons.

As shoehorned-in via that opening quote, however, the emphasis here was on sustainability. About 50% of the collection Grant reckoned was made from repurposed fabrics, much of it provided by Astco, an industrial recycler whose boss happens to be a Grant bespoke client at Norton & Sons and who pitched in with the denim and shirting. Then there was the darning and patching, executed by students from the Royal College of Needlework (also an often-time collaborator of Sarah Burton’s). This saw irregular check patches insinuated upon herringbone outerwear, or herringbone patches upon check suiting, or layers of differently washed denim patched onto denim. In the suiting especially it was interesting, adding a depth of patina and pentimento, a roughness, to that most surface-defined of menswear genres.

Backstage Grant railed like a Shakespearean lead with a BBC reality show contract about the conflicting instincts that mutual fealty to fashion and ecological survival stir up, then disclosed he has started darning his clothes, which in turn prompted a very senior and glamorous Hearst editor to disclose that she now darns her pantyhose (is Hearst in trouble?). The fundamental point about E. Tautz is that if you like it then buy it because the quality is superb. You will wear it until you, not it, are due for recycling. Unless we all decide to go naked, that’s about as ecologically sound as fashion can be.

Source: Vogue

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Martin Margiela: In His Own Words

“Have you said everything you wanted to say in fashion?”

“No.”

That is the promise dangling at the end of Reiner Holzemer’s new documentary, Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, which premiered at the Doc NYC film festival last week. After 90-ish minutes of exposition from Margiela himself, who remains so elusive only his hands were filmed, Holzemer abruptly asks if fashion’s most celebrated genius is really, truly, undeniably done with it all. No. And then the screen cuts to black.

Any hopes of Margiela’s return to fashion will have to be sidelined for now, however. “He won’t work as a fashion designer anymore in his life—probably,” Holzemer told Vogue during an interview on the day of the film’s world premiere. “But you never know. We all love that the movie ends with this. It gives you a nice smile in the end, which is important.”

Holzemer’s film is not so much about where Martin Margiela is in 2019—the designer speaks of painting and sculpting, though those pursuits are not shown in the documentary—or what he might do in 2020, but about the 20 years from 1989 to 2009 during which Margiela operated his eponymous label. As a portrait of a finite body of work—the two decades of Martin Margiela runway shows—Holzemer’s film operates as a circle: It begins with Margiela’s Spring 2009 20th-anniversary show, his final one, then waltzes through a chronology of his life and career with the help of talking head interviews with Olivier Saillard, Carla Sozzani, Stella Ishii, Pierre Rougier, Cathy Horyn, and more of his models, collaborators, friends, and critics, before finishing back at Margiela’s swan song.

That format allows for deep dives into the designer’s key collections and career points. It helps that the documentary was made alongside the preparation and installation of the Palais Galliera’s 2018 exhibit, Margiela / Galliera, 1989-2009. For 42 days, Holzemer, sometimes alone, sometimes with a skeleton crew, would visit the museum or Margiela’s studio and get the designer talking. “Which garments are important, which do you think we have to include in the movie?” Holzemer says he asked Margiela as they began filming. There were 110 items in the exhibit, and he made a list of 90 for the film.

Ultimately, they settled on around 70 crucial pieces, which are presented with voiceovers by the designer. These range from his cork necklaces—which we see Margiela making with his own hands as the film starts—through his doll collection of 1994 and his stockman collection of 1997. “I’m very grateful that he opened up and he trusted me so much. It was not always easy for him,” Holzemer says. The hits are all here: The Spring 1990 show staged in a playground (“The most magical show of my career”), his time as creative director of Hermès (“For me, luxury is the perfect balance between quality and comfort and if I could go farther I would add timelessness”), the Spring 2007 show that worked to establish new Margiela codes (“I wanted to be different, new, without rejecting my fans…. It felt like a new beginning.”)

As the movie seeks to illustrate, Margiela did almost everything that is on trend in contemporary fashion first: He had street cast shows, he popularized the long, lean lines of the ’90s, he made a reissue collection for his 10th show, he pushed and pushed and pushed the creative bounds of what a fashion show was and what a fashion brand could look be. “I hope that, first of all, his name and the work stays alive, that people discover how influential he was, how much of what we see today on the catwalks is sometimes copied one-to-one—I don’t need to mention the names, I’m not an expert of that,” Holzemer says. “I think if the world knows where the Margiela influence comes from, that would make me very happy.”

Of course, what Margiela also did first was what he did last: Leave fashion for good. “I was not made to cope with that system as well as Jean Paul Gaultier,” says Margiela, who was Gaultier’s assistant before launching his own label. “Jean Paul always said, ‘Martin you’re too serious,’ and it’s true […] I am probably too serious for that world.” Margiela’s departure is a story that has become familiar within fashion’s creative industries: the struggle to translate a personal passion into a corporate consumer product. It’s here that the film touches a nerve, but instead of prodding it, it lets the audience read between the lines. The sale of Maison Martin Margiela to Renzo Rosso’s Only the Brave group, the departure of Margiela’s partner Jenny Meirens, and Margiela’s own absence are covered without too much emotionality, although fashion insiders will be able to interpret Margiela’s careful language about the reason for his departure: “At the end, I became, in a certain way, an artistic director in my company and that bothered me because I am a designer […] I am not a creative director who directs his assistants.”

The irony of Holzemer’s delicate portrait of an artist in absence is that it was Margiela’s replacement who inspired the director to take an interest in fashion as a subject. (Holzemer worked on films about photographers before taking up fashion with the documentary Dries about Dries Van Noten in 2017.) “Why I wanted to make a fashion movie was the Galliano story,” Holzemer says, referencing the public meltdown that got John Galliano fired from his position at Christian Dior. After entering rehab, Galliano was named the artistic director of Maison Margiela in 2015. “I read a big article about the pressure fashion designers are under. I was really touched by that article. It was a bad thing that Galliano did, but in that article it explained that some of the designers take drugs to survive. Alexander McQueen killed himself. That was the thing that caused my sensitivity for the profession, for the world, for the industry. […] How do I say it? I work hard too, but the fashion designers work so hard under such pressure wherever that pressure comes from, sometimes it’s big companies, sometimes it’s yourself. That it’s really a challenge to remain in that business for so long and to survive in that business in a healthy way.”

Holzemer indicates that he knows there is a lot of pain here for Martin Margiela—but he won’t say anything about it, nor does much of that tension make it to the screen. “You don’t see that in the movie. Often I was looking at his face, the camera was on the wall, it was only listening, and I thought, It would be so strong if I could show your face now. I still have it in my memory. It was often very touching. The story was always surprising because you could not read it. He told it for the first time: How he felt after the first show, how he felt after 10 years, and how he felt in the end. Nobody knew that before.”

Even with these small, tender moments of Margiela’s vulnerability that reveal the glimmer of a sensitive, caring, gentle man, this documentary doesn't go beyond affirming many of the myths already made about Martin Margiela. Yes, there are incredible glimpses into his childhood in Genk, Belgium, and his sketchbooks—with every year of the designer’s life saved by his mother, Léa Bouchet—but the final film still works behind layers of abstraction. It is mostly about the exhibit, it is without its star’s visage, and even the voice over of Margiela’s lyrical Franco-Belgian intonation is slightly engineered to cloak the reality of what Martin Margiela actually sounds like. In Dries, one of the most compelling moments is one that seems almost incidental: Van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, silently snipping flowers from their garden and arranging them throughout their house, not a word spoken, not a nod exchanged. “You can talk a lot about perfectionism or obsession but there you see it, you feel it, and it says it all,” Holzemer says of that scene.

Martin Margiela: In His Own Words never gets to that show-don’t-tell moment because so much of the story has to be told in voiceover or in interview segments. To adequately show the brilliance of Martin in the year 2019—30 years after his seismic start and a decade after that anniversary show that proved to be his last—something really unexpected would have to happen in the film. For the most part, it doesn’t. But maybe it’s best that the curtain stays drawn a little longer. By protecting Margiela from the cold gaze of a camera, Holzemer allows us superfans to keep our fashion-world hero alive, no flaws, no tensions, no negativity; only these memories and the knowledge that the heart behind the Margiela universe is still beating. Toward the end of the film, Holzemer shows the opening of the Galliera exhibit, long lines shivering in Paris’s March cold. Inside, Vogue editors gasp at the installation, Raf Simons gestures at a mannequin, Rick Owens contemplates in admiration. The legend of Martin Margiela lives on. And then there’s always the promise of his return….

Source: Vogue

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