Fendi Fall 2020 Menswear

Shortly after his participation at the LVMH Prize event last year, the shortlisted designer Kunihiko Morinaga of Anrealage was approached by Silvia Fendi. Would, she asked, he consider being part of her next menswear show? Morinaga said yes, of course, and backstage this morning he could be found watching the final lineup. Fendi, he noted, is a seriously big operation.

When his looks came out the planned Anrealage coup de théâtre did not quite come off. Those of us who attend his women’s shows in Paris could anticipate what to expect, but for the rest of the audience the transformation of his four looks from white slate to logo’d and patterned when placed under UV light was too subtle to startle.

However, that isn’t to say they didn’t make a fitting closing gesture at a show whose very interesting collection felt like it was about putting what is conventionally on the inside on the outside, and about modularity, and about technology, and about the place of classicism in an iconoclastic age—this collection was about a lot. It also looked good.

Backstage, Fendi said her reach-out to Morinaga had come out of the thinking that led to her solar women’s show shortly before that LVMH event last September and because her early thought of this menswear collection had included the notion of “transforming garments.” Away from Anrealage’s photochromatic transformation, Fendi’s shape-shifting attire including three-panel coats in fur or different tones of flannel that could be unzipped according to whether you planned to wear an overcoat, a jacket, or a bolero. There were also pants (from the front) and skirt (from the back) hybrids, which moved easily and looked attractive. There was another dialectic in the patterned jackets, coats, and hats: Some were in patched shearling that looked like cashmere, others in tufted cashmere that looked like shearling. “I want to give everybody the choice,” said Fendi.

She said her fundamental agenda was “to work on the essentials of the classic wardrobe of a man of tomorrow,” and one especially clever, modernizing twist on the classic was bringing the contours of linings and inside pockets to, a whole panoply of coats, vests and jackets. For good measure, Fendi added several credit card pockets and an AirPods compartment, and revived the historical cigar pocket. On contrast tailored jackets, leather jackets, and even shaved shearling, these outlines were both attractive and functional.

Another almost Surrealist but simultaneously functional play on interior and surface was the presentation of bags that appeared to be pieces of Fendi yellow packaging, rather than actual Fendi products. There was an oversize Fendi shopper in leather, and multiple Fendi boxes that were more like tiny trunks. Opening a box to reveal an item designed to be nearly identical to its packaging would surely be the ultimate Barthesian feedback loop.

The packaging riff extended to the garments via yellow taping stamped with Fendi Roma that defined the seams of certain outerwear pieces, and knit bags which had a satisfyingly hand-wrought roughness to them but that also resembled shoe and garment holders. For footwear, Fendi proposed a luxurified version of a mid-calf gumboot, also seen at Dolce, Ferragamo, and Prada. This was a collection rich in obvious luxury, in that the fabrication and construction was both extremely elevated and expertly done. It was also rich in ideas and ambition—a much more subtle but potent ingredient for luxury—and there were in those inside-out pieces quite probably a few of the future classics Fendi said she aspired to.

Source: Vogue

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Burberry Pre-Fall 2020

The main points of the Burberry women’s and men’s pre-fall are as difficult to encompass as is Riccardo Tisci’s task of covering the fashion consciousness of the globe. Perhaps that’s why he thought to include the motif of an old navigational map, which is printed on silk head squares and variously pleated, draped, and patch-worked. It’s a collection that isn’t anchored in any one idea; it travels between disparate tropes, representing the biggest British fashion brand to all generations, for all times and occasions.

Not that you can’t see who’s captain. Tisci’s eye for the elegant and sexy, his far-from-earthy, English-classic countrywear, his aspirational streetwear, and a Kim Kardashian West moment are all logged in this journey around Burberry world. (KKW already wore the beige jeans with a boned corset top in look 14. The skin-tight chestnut leather boot-chaps are actually built in, with pointy stiletto booties completing the sprayed-on illusion.)

Tisci always promised to expand eveningwear when he came to Burberry—he brought knowledge of the territory with him. Burberry evening suits are now a uniform go-to for men on red carpets, while the women’s nighttime is a fully calibrated repertoire ranging from a drop-dead backless goddess silver streak with a snaky train to a bubblegum pink plissé knee-length dress with slashed medieval sleeves, through to ingenuous black tailoring. Women looking for trouser alternatives for the awards season will doubtless leap on the standout opportunities of the graphic cutaway cape coat with a gold chain belt, and the sophisticated yet cool layering of a silk-fringed coat, tabard, and narrow trousers.

Branding for Burberry? Logos are threaded through, for those who care to carry the obvious house identifiers. The recognizable, rounded, retro TB designed by Peter Saville comes as a gilt buckle on handbags, printed on a vibrant padded gilet with a matching checked coat, and appears all over the place in linings. Otherwise BURBERRY is exploded in giant type on nylon parka sleeves.

The Burberry check is less in evidence this season, but Tisci’s translations of country fare very much are. With fashion in the mood for tweediness, his orange-lined checked poncho with a tunic trouser suit underneath looks highly viable for women who’d never go on a shooting weekend, but also for members of international country house society. Otherwise, Tisci’s sweeping view of demographics brings a Euro spin to what he does with quilting—turning a trad-boxy template glam on a jacket with a torso-clinching knitted insert and pairing it with a pencil skirt.

Men’s tradition is well served by a beige car coat that comes with a chocolate brown puffer lining, worn over a blue-and-white striped banker shirt with TB woven into it. There is something very Italian about that—the kind of Italian-ness that British men envy and are happy to buy for themselves.

For men too there’s a small section of Econyl outerwear, the branded synthetic fiber, which is regenerated from waste such as fishing nets, carpet, and fabric scraps. It’s one Burberry contribution to the new circular economy. At a moment when the climate crisis is at the top of everyone’s minds, resetting luxury to align with fossil-fuel-saving resources like this can’t happen fast enough.

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

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

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

FASHIONADO

OAMC Polly Shirt Jacket With All-Over Flower Print

OAMC has just dropped a mid-weight padded jacket that is the perfect for the coming months ahead. The silk close-weave Polly Shirt Jacket sees light padding for warmth but is cut in a pattern that resembles a shirt.

The Polly Shirt Jacket continues on with button cuffs, touch-fastening side pockets, a spread collar, and is constructed from 100% silk. The main feature of the jacket can be seen all across the front and back, as OAMC’s “Yellow Flower” graphic makes its way on the surface of the jacket in great detail.

Those interested can find the OAMC Polly Shirt Jacket over at LN-CC for a price of €2,290 EUR (approximately $2,575 USD).

Source: HypeBeast

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Burberry Releases SS19 Runway Zip-Up Shirt

Burberry has released one of its most iconic Spring/Summer 2019 runway pieces, the “WHY DID THEY KILL BAMBI?” deer-print shirt.

The Riccardo Tisci-designed piece is steeped in history and references. The printed phrase takes after more than just one pool of inspiration, as it looks to the lyrics of the Sex Pistols’ 1979 song “Who Killed Bambi?” — which was incidentally co-written by Vivienne Westwood, who soon went on to collaborate with Tisci at Burberry — as well as Tisci’s time as the head of Givenchy, which delivered a number of iconic Bambi-adorned pieces. The print also nods to the fact that Burberry said it would no longer use fur in its future collections.

Burberry’s short-sleeve offering is made from cotton twill and features a half-zip down the front using leather hardware. The boxy fit is complemented by two box-shaped chest pockets, and on the rear, Burberry has added two pictures of a porcelain deer.

Take a closer look at this SS19 runway piece from Burberry in the gallery above, and pick it up for yourself from retailers such as MATCHESFASHION.COM for $903 USD.

Source: HypeBeast

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