Men’s – British Boy. S.S. Daley AW24

January 12, 2024January 17, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Pitti Uomo had two guest designers this year: the punk-at-heart Magliano and the very-English S.S. Daley. The latter had a big announcement to make: the minority-investment boost from Harry Styles, who’s a frequent collaborator and muse of the brand. The musician wears Steven Stokey-Daley‘s clothes at such frequency that one might easily say that the London-based brand is Harry Styles-coded. But it’s really the other way round.

Back to the autumn-winter 2024 collection: it was a story of an Englishman in Florence, playing fast and loose with the entrenched emblems and rites of passage of the British upper class boy’s school culture. The themes – some familiar S.S. Daley heartland classics, wrapped up in the kind of storytelling twists he once called micro-subversions – might have been less theatrical in their delivery than usual, but they came with a flourish of polish and confidence. On came a lad wearing a tail-coat, shirt, and no trousers – partly an echo of the wastrel party-going culture of Oxford in the 1980s that was captured by the photographer Dafydd Jones. But partly, too, it was the introduction of his queer evocation of a diary by an Oxford student in 1935. “He always opened each entry with writing about being ‘in Eliot’s room.’” Stokey-Daley had stacks of pillows installed as a conceptual set. “So the idea is that this suddenly becomes this abstracted version of Eliot’s room – and it’s more a conversation about that sort of shared living. Underwear, pajamas, sporting wear, boys in tails.” A huge, quilted piped-edged duvet coat and a couple vast ‘tapestry’ knitted blanket ponchos riffed on the morning-after idea of rolling out of bed wrapped in your bedclothes. Alongside this, the designer had been reading “The Last Panic,” a short story by E. M. Forster about a young English boy’s “carnal awakening” with a fisherman while on holiday in Italy. Hence the symbolic oversize fish-print that turned up on a shirt later in the collection. But, really, ‘reading’ S.S. Daley doesn’t require crib notes and reference studies. The point of his clothes, ever since he was a student himself, is that they’re never costume. They are very British, of course, but just always a little cleverly, quirkily left of the generically classic.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Incense In The Air. John Alexander Skelton AW24

January 12, 2024January 17, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

In London, (the unofficial) Men’s Fashion Week couldn’t begin in a more astounding, ecclesiastically-euphoric way. At St. Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish church, with air heavy with incense, John Alexander Skelton had his triumphant return to the runway. For autumn-winter 2024, the designer -took inspiration from the gothic aesthetic and intangible emotions that This Mortal Coil, an ’80s dream pop collective, elicited. “It’s my emotional response to the music“, he said. That took shape in romantic longline coats, tailored suiting, knitwear and shirting, with Skelton’s signature horn buttons dotted throughout, and sported by stately models clutching lit candles in hand. Regal, but chic; mystical, but not whimsy.

Inky blacks composed the majority of this season’s palette, a choice Skelton attributed to examining 15th-century portraiture in which wearing black was “generally thought of as a power symbol,” he explained. It was contrasted with a drop of blood-red ruby, which took the form of meaty velvets. While John Alexander Skelton is often inclined to spin a rich and theatrical yarn around his collections, the essence of his appeal lies in the clothes themselves – just hold one of his shirts or tailored trousers in your hands, and the extraordinary craftsmanship and timeless textiles look and feel just as arresting as any of his runway spectacles.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Characters. Magliano AW24

January 11, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Luca Magliano is the name that finally shakes up the term “emerging designer” in case of Italian fashion – which has always been monopolized by the hegemony of big brands. Being the guest designer at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, Magliano presented a collection that delivered the true, uncompromising essence of the brand: poetic, heavy-on-tailoring clothes with a punk spirit at heart. Characters – not just models – swathed in gray, mud and sage green garments strode the long staircase used as a runway at the Nelson Mandela Forum. What stood out the most was the layering which in case of Magliano goes to extremes and carries a certain sense of fluidity: a varsity jacket worn over a too-long chunky sweater, an over-sized Armani-esque jacket topping a billow-y shirt and voluminous cargo pants, a plum, buttoned cardigan styled as cape over a black boucle coat… the list of outfit-sandwiches goes on and on. What else makes this brand so different comparing to the gloss and perfectionism of Italian runways is the styling that feels spontaneous and utterly authentic. Autumn-winter 2024 hero look: the silver fox model in sequined pants and a cat-bearing fuzzy sweater, plus unexpected accessories: a what seems to be plastic grocery bag and velvet slippers in burgundy. It’s just the beginning of menswear fashion month, but this look already seems to be one of my ultimate favorites of the season.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Ranch. Phipps AW23

August 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Now that he’s decamped from Paris and relocated to the sunny Hollywood Hills in his home state of California, it’s safe to say that Spencer Phipps has entered his LA era. “I wanted to focus on the core essence of what Phipps represents and I think I can do it better in the US. It makes more sense for the brand from a marketing strategy, a business strategy, and also my own personal life.” To present the autumn-winter 2023 Phipps collection, he chose a quintessential Hollywood location, Big Sky Movie Ranch. If you’ve never heard of this sprawling landscape set deep in Ventura County, you’ve certainly seen it on TV and in the movies; it was used as a set for everything from Little House on the Prairie to Twin Peaks to, most recently, Babylon. If Phipps’s design story were a script, this would be that pivotal scene where the protagonist takes control of the narrative. Over the year that he’s been back, he’s refined the brand identity, drawing on inspiration from its rugged workwear roots; formally introduced denim and underwear, and built out his womenswear. There’s even talk of moving all production from Portugal to LA. He counts these as the progressive steps that align with a commitment to US-based manufacturing and sustainable practices.

Phipps’s work is grounded in reality; he extracts elements of American subcultures—western, grunge, punk – and reimagines them through a contemporary lens modeled on a diverse cast of characters including real cowboys, bikers, and one multi-hyphenate jiu jitsu black belt-magician-guitarist. The designer ties the brand divisions together through cohesive design and layered styling. For the new season, the influence of Richard Avedon’s American West series came across in blanket capes and chap jeans crafted from upcycled leather scraps and vintage denim, whereas grommets and d-rings spoke to the influence of the ’50s teens in Karlheinz Weinberger’s photography. Standout pieces from the new womenswear included long, straight, slouchy jeans and a deadstock pullover anorak paired with a camouflage midi skirt. On the men’s side, there were “butch florals” in the form of camouflage patterns and subtle hieroglyphs representative of the four archetypes of masculinity – the king, warrior, magician, and lover. “We’ve always been doing our own thing and will continue to do so,” he said. “Our voice stood out in the Paris landscape and I believe the same will happen here, but with a bigger community.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Artist At Home. S.S. Daley SS24

July 11, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The theme of artist at home has sprung dozens of stories where a visionary creates a vividly alive environment that becomes not only their studio, but a “total artwork” (Germans have a term for it: Gesamtkunstwerk). History of art – especially the British one – has plenty of examples of such romances between creatives and their surroundings. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Sir John Soane’s home-turned-museum. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Charleston, which became a bucolic residency spot for the Bloomsbury Group. For his spring-summer 2024 collection, Steven Stokey-Daley centres around the duality of ceremony and practice, following the life and home of an artist. Harry Styles’ favourite designer began his research by studying the lives of British painters Lucien Freud and David Hockney in their working environments, taking a look back at British public school dress while examining the shifts in sexual identity in the early 1900s. All that sounds distinctly S.S. Daley. The new season offering is a neat continuation of Steven’s style vocabulary: clean-cut suiting is paired with pleated shorts, blooming hydrangea embroideries decorate striped workwear sets, oversized wool knits are canvases for charming dachshund puppies (Hockney’s favorite breed, as well as mine!) and ducks. Some of the shirts come in still life fruit bowl print, which reminisces the ever-evolving European artistic tradition. Multi-pocketed, waterproof coats are nonchalantly splashed with paint (you just always splatter your favorite clothes while painting!), echoing the collection’s idea of merging the domestic intimacy with the sacred act of creating and expressing your own, untamed, highly-personal thing.