Men’s – Each Man Kills The Things He Loves. Saint Laurent SS24

June 13, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Anthony Vaccarello took Saint Laurent to Berlin, the city of Lydia Tár and Helmut Newton. The first signs as to where the designer was going with his spring-summer 2024 men’s show – a miracle of impressive tailoring broad in the shoulders and attenuated in the legs, interspersed with yet more shoulders, nakedly fragile this time, framed by gossamer silk or chiffon sleeveless shirting – was to be found on Instagram. A brief clip of the 1950 French short film, Un Chant d’Amour, a grainy black and white ode to sensuality as much to criminality, and directed by the writer Jean Genet, delivered the first vibes. Vaccarello also mentioned the name of the collection: Each Man Kills the Things He Loves. The title was, by way of Oscar Wilde, the song sung by Jeanne Moreau in a movie adaptation of one of the French writer’s great novels, Querelle de Brest. It was later filmed in 1982 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder simply as Querelle. Et voila, there you have it: Moreau, an icon of the French nouvelle vague, as Parisian as, well, Yves Saint Laurent, and Fassbinder, one of Berlin’s most legendary directors, a man who knew a thing or two about dissonant sexuality and the power between men and women as much as, well, again, Saint Laurent.

Still, what Vaccarello showed this Monday was far, far more than a clue-laden trail of reference A to B. He himself might have Berlin as part of his own personal landscape of the past – as a student in Brussels back in the day, he would hit the city’s still-going-at-noon-the-next-day nightclubs – but in many respects, this impressive and assured outing wasn’t only about the city. While there might be deft and nimble references to each locale, with each carrying a certain resonance in the YSL universe, this was, once again, Vaccarello in superbly rigorous mode, an approach echoed by his choice of venue, the structural precision of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie (my favourite museum in Berlin!). “When you leave the show, I want you to have the silhouette clearly in your head,” he said backstage. In other words, it’s a design approach that’s thoughtful, concise, and intent on stripping away the fuss to the perfect distillation of 50 looks, exploring – and what could be more YSL than this? – the exquisite tension between tailleur, aka suiting, and flou, all that light-as-air, fluid, sensual soft dressing, of which there was plenty in this men’s show. The exchange between his women’s and his men’s played out in delicate slipper satin tanks with deep décolletés under swaggering jackets, the matching pants cut high and narrow at the waist (ooof: breathe in!) and sliced at the ankles to show off high chunky-heeled boots. In leopard spots or polka dots (two recurring leitmotifs here) as sensually wrapped shirts or as one-shouldered tops, their bow-tie necklines trailing southwards like veils. And in prosaic black sweatshirting transformed into couture-y evening looks, draped to slide off the shoulders, with a new laidback version of smoking pants. An honorable mention too to the myriad sublime tuxedos that opened and closed this show. They also followed the impressively shouldered and roomy line of his jackets and the narrowness of the trousers. With their bow ties and high-collared shirts, and distinctly androgyne chic, they gave a bit of a Tár vibe.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Community. Martine Rose SS24

June 13, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The spring-summer 2024 menswear fashion month has kicked off with Martine Rose‘s dynamic fashion show in London. “Before there were actual club venues as such, people from so many communities co-opted community centers and youth clubs to put on their club nights. All over London, wherever waves of immigrants have come in, you saw them – West Indian, Turkish, Polish, Irish – everyone has had their own community centers. They’re really important, the life-blood, ” Rose said. ”And this one – at St Joseph’s Parish Centre – is untouched. I thought it would be fun for people to sit down, have a drink, and feel pulled into participating in something.” Her living celebration of London subcultural codes opened on a blast of reggae. Out walked the totally believable Martine Rose cast of characters in clothes layered in her subversively kinky takes on men’s and womenswear. “I love playing with gender lines. I find it very sexy – I love men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes. It’s things that I’ve played with a long time. And I think it’s a real proposition. Not a gimmick, you know, a genuine proposal.”

Sure enough, there was a complete and recognizable wardrobe of recurring Rose signatures – her oversized tailored jackets, voluminous floor-sweeping coats, and reappropriated hi-viz workwear and sportswear. To give it a sense of lived-in ownership, she used worn-in, washed, and patinated materials.“Because I never like it when things look new. There’s a kind of make-do-and-mend – like denim we patched with gaffer tape,” she explained. Rose developed the hunched-forward shouderline of women’s leather jackets from looking at the posture of motorbike-riders. Her ideas seem always to come up through those kinds of socially-observed transferences—from the pre-existing, from gestures or half-dressed slip-ups. Her women’s skirts were inside out, with pleats bursting from under linings, creating a cool volume. Then there were her wicked twists of humor. “For menswear, I always like this tension between two poles. I’m using quite classic things like tailoring and sportswear, but the other pole has to be quite far apart. So I was looking at quite stately lady things, like Barbour jackets cut on a ’50s women’s a-line, corsetry, and pearls.” And all of a sudden, you glimpse a very British class joke going on.

Men’s – On The Phone. Courrèges AW23

February 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Courrèges is gradually becoming a brand with a contemporary feel that offers some truly desirable clothes. All that thanks to Nicolas Di Felice, who with every season redefines what this French label is to a modern-day audience. The most important aspect the designer orbits around is the functionality of clothes seen through the lens of social observation. In the men’s autumn-winter 2023 (and women’s pre-fall) line-up, his thought process was triggered by watching the phenomenon of people hunching over their phones. “I’m really working on kind of a new silhouette that is really, like, bending,” he said. “It really seems like nothing, but actually it’s something, this reflection of us on our phones.” Somehow, that idea bloomed into a sexy and cool wardrobe. Technically, Felice’s inspiration of the staring-at-screens impact on human posture brought about a slight forward-tilt of the shoulder line – and the ingenious idea of inserting an invisible zipper extending to the elbow on the inside of tailored sleeves, “so you don’t have to ruin you clothes!” The lines of Courrèges are sharp, mostly dark, and cleverly sliced by Di Felice to adapt the original space-age minimalism of the founder for the new generation. That’s another of his talents: witness what he’s named “mini-skirt pants.” It looks like a plain black long-sleeved tunic, but there’s a narrow gap, high up on the thigh; a flash of flesh where the hem meets the pants. An incendiary item he proposes for all genders. Très cool.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus. Loewe AW23

January 23, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Season after season, Jonathan Anderson keeps on delivering the most innovative, technically mind-blowing, disturbing – in a way great art feels! – and unexpected collections for Loewe. His autumn-winter 2023 line-up for the brand is the most brilliant and thrilling outing we’ve seen this entire menswear season. “I do feel like less is more. But in a new way,” said the designer. “I don’t think we’re heading into modernity like it was. It’s not like ’90s modernity; there’s something more peculiar happening.” For Anderson, clothes are the main objects of consideration – not the runway venue (a white cube showcasing artworks by contemporary artist Julien Nguyen became the perfect, harmonious backdrop), not celebrity appearances (it’s not easy to make the collection itself more attention-seizing than Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russel sitting in the f-row). This designer is one of the vanishingly few in the luxurysphere who believes that it’s enough to put clothes, and deep-thinking about them, first. It’s reached the point where it feels radical, avant-garde. “I think – I hope – that we’re going into a period where it is about being uncomfortable in design,” he added. “That we are trying to find something new.” This conversation was in his debrief, after a menswear show that proved, par excellence, that there’s nothing more absorbing and mentally exciting than simply being able to react to the meanings of what’s before you. And to witness configurations of stuff you’ve never quite seen before.

In Anderson’s world, the subject of clothes is multi-layered but startlingly focused on clarity; what be called “a reductionist act.” His collection was about exaggerating the materiality of fashion fabrication into the realms of pure-lined 3D sculpture – full metal jackets beaten by artisans from copper and pewter; stand away structured coats molded by hat-makers. What he’d done with the short, back-fastened shirts is quite a riddle. Some of them were rigid, wrinkled vellum – the work of traditional book-binders. Others were delicately made in hammered silk, a match for the boxer shorts, worn with nothing but leather ankle-boots. “I wanted the idea of something which is quite sensual underneath, with something quite hard,” said Anderson. Some of the boys wore angel wings. That’s where the reference spun sideways into the multiple art-historical/homoerotic sensibilities that focus Anderson’s vision. Partly, it was about resurrecting to modernity the iconography of old masters painters, specifically, the work of the French romantic allegories of Prud’hon and the link Anderson has made with Nguyen. His digital artworks – referencing traditional painting techniques – of Nikos, a Loewe model, were blown up in the center of the stage. What might end up sounding complicated was as distilled and to-the-point as could be. Anderson glorified Loewe’s craft skills in leather goods in textures of suede and shearling, shaved into sensuously tactile bulbous silhouettes in this show. But equally as head-turning were his pared-back, brilliantly on-the-money Loewe desirables: long, slimline coats in leather, and the reiterated wool shapes with deeply plunging cowl necklines. They were worn with a gesture—one arm out, crooked in a way which played on the mind like a memory of classical portraiture. Simple, but way out of the ordinary. Anderson felt that arriving at that coat had hit the quintessential mark. “Sometimes, by getting that one look, it helps you to create a narrative throughout the show,” he said. “There’s something in that it says everything and nothing at the same time“.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Renewal & Change. Dior AW23

January 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The autumn-winter 2023 collection is Kim Jones‘ best line-up for Dior Men, hands down. It felt like an eureka moment, a direction for the designer to take with the brand. The new season sees a change of spirit and style, with Jones presenting an absolute understanding of sophisticated menswear that can be both unexpected and easy, refined and relevant. Inspiration-wise, the British designer returned to his extensive collection of rare books once again. He brought in Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie to recite The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s epically difficult, melancholic poem written in the aftermath of World War I. Jones owns six copies of this work of English literature which is considered to be pivotal to the modernism of exactly a century ago; so there were the faces of Pattinson and Christie, filmed by Baillie Walsh, and blown up on massive screens as the models walked past. All that’s just to fill in the background. What Jones took from the meaning of this most British of works was to do with its themes of time passing, death and renewal. “For me, I read it as about renewal and change; times changing,” he said before the show. “So it begins with Christian Dior dying, and then Yves Saint Laurent coming in and suddenly doing new things. And there’s a lot of me in it.” To parse the fashion stanzas: there were pale, neutral colors, a looseness and fluidity, layerings of transparent trails streaming from the backs of trousers. There was a moment for jackets and sweaters embroidered with tiny chains of abstracted lily of the valley, the early spring flower-favorite of Christian Dior. Then, as Christie and Pattinson spoke Eliot’s passages on death by drowning, there were conceptual life jackets with tonally matched buoyancy pads, riffs on seafarer’s Aran knits, voluminous A-line storm coats, takes on yellow seafaring oilskin raincoats, and sou’westers. Over the long run, Jones has been a pioneer in bringing street references into high fashion, and then insisting on applying Christian Dior’s women’s templates to menswear. As times move on, it’s a measure of Jones’s influence that the skirts – and shorts so wide that they look like skirts – in this show now pass as quite normal. He’s working in 2023, not 1923, like T.S. Eliot. English academics the world over might be aghast at Eliot’s poetry being used in a fashion show, but the two Britishers at least have this in common: being out to change the discipline they work in, mediating between history and the future.