Peter Do has delivered one of the most convincing, coherent and desirable collections of this entire New York Fashion Week. If Helmut Lang, the designer, showed collections in 2022, then this might have been the effect – it’s this good. What gave Do this sort of new confidence is the official launch of menswear. The spring-summer 2023 show was opened with a men’s look: the double breasted jacket fastened with a single button over a white shirt, both with a large triangle cutout exposing a flash of muscled back, over a pair of full satin pants with open side seams that tapered at the ankle over those signature boots. The model was Lee Jeno of the K-Pop group NCT who has 3.4 million followers on Instagram. Celebrity influencers will play their part, but more important: Do’s exacting, even methodical approach is equal to his ambition. As with his women’s, tailoring is central to Do’s aesthetic. In fact, the offering is more or less unisex, in addition to being quite sexy. “During the fitting process we try everything on both, 80% is pretty genderless,” he explained. For him, for her, for them: over the course of 60 looks – this was one of New York’s bigger shows – Do set out his vision. It involves deconstruction in the form of suits slit open at the hem to reveal their inner workings, minimal leaning ornamentation like tone-on-tone suture stitches over seams, and the two- or three-in-one versatility that he’s built into his work from the start. Waistbands can be adjusted to accommodate different sized hips and clever pleated skirts are attached to belts so they can be open and closed, almost like curtains. Shirts can play it straight, meaning buttoned from collar to hem, or they can be worn wrapped around the waist for the undone look he favored here. Another novelty, this one on the sustainable tip: a tank and pants in what looked like patent leather were made from discarded shrimp shells, a food industry waste product.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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