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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Romantic Spontaneity. Dries van Noten AW23

January 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Dries Van Noten‘s autumn-winter 2023 menswear collection is infused with some of the designer’s favorite elements, like haute tailoring, floral romanticism, and a youthful spirit. And there’s also that feeling of spontaneity, which can definitely inspire your own wardrobe without going out for shopping. Besides the things Dries did with tailoring – lots of narrow waists, lean coat silhouettes – the rest of the collection was about “the freedom and self-expression of rave culture from the ’90s, combined with the quite surreal beauty of nature”. Strange partners, you might think, but Van Noten had found a novel seasonal way to exert his love of botanical prints in the work of the early 19th century German geologist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Once, when up a mountain at high altitude in the Andes, he wrote that “he started feeling trippy,” as Van Noten put it. “And so – rave!” Well, if that was a bit of a stretch as a conceptual leap, it did give him the excuse to design into some of his favorite signatures in flowery, exotic prints. The rave looks were played out through washed-out linen pants, swirly prints on jackets, and multiple layerings of lacy-knits and drapey sweatshirts. While the overall might feel slightly unedited, these are all of the casual separates that will be bought piece by piece by men, come summer.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Sharp Gothic. Rick Owens AW23

January 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rick Owens wanted to imbue his latest collection with an “elaborate modesty,” partially drawn from the British queen’s 19th century reign. Said the designer: “It’s a Victorian silhouette. There’s a prudishness. We remember that era so much for suppressing sensuality, but doing it in such an elaborate way that you couldn’t help but think about it.” Cloaks, skirts (some almost pencil), tightly gathered parkas, and voluminous pyramid-paneled shearlings that had a ladylike grandeur, heightened by the handbags, were the chief protagonists in Owens’s pivot to would-be primness. A further act of withdrawal, of self-containment, was played out in the ‘donut’ padded pieces – wearable soft furnishings – into which some models were inserted. “That’s me trying to reduce garments to the simplest shape I could. They’re literally duvet donuts. They’re like the fog machine of clothes – dumb and super-simple.” There was much more in this collection to relish, including many fine denim and cow-hide spike shouldered jackets, and the increasingly amazing pieces that Owens’s team is crafting from pirarucu. Because the runway was raised around a meter or so we got an eyeful of the footwear, which included a powerful new orthopedic variation of his glamorous platform boots. However the central tension rested in Owens’s urge to consider modesty in a collection that was as typically laden with sexuality as ever. There is always a sly irony secreted in this designer’s gothic bombast, a space where he posits questions despite, or more likely because of, the lack of an easy answer. And there is a highly autobiographical element too. He said: “I’m indulging in the exercise of taking my misdirected uncertain youth and reshaping it as a 61 year old man at the height of my powers. Being able to revisit that and create what I wanted life to be then, it’s so fun.” This comment led me to propose that Tyrone Dylan, who has now opened so many of Rick’s shows, has become a sort of personified cipher for Owen’s idealized youth. “Absolutely! Tyrone is like an idealization of that kind of vitality that I don’t think I ever actually really had – although I probably had moments of it. But I’m able to really project it on him. And also, you know, having him open each men’s show it’s sending a message about values; about not having things be so disposable. It’s about loyalty, about family, and about how my personal life is completely connected to what I put out there.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Blow Up. Hed Mayner AW23

January 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Hed Mayner, the designer from Tel Aviv who captivates the Parisian crowd for a couple seasons now, loves a big silhouette. He is known for blowing up conventional clothes to XXXL size, creating garments that are both timeless and absolutely poetic. In his autumn-winter 2023, Mayner has some of the most desirable pieces of the season: denim cargos pants meet gargantuan wind-jackets, an exquisitely tailored jacket that comes with unisex pinstriped skirt, thick cashmere socks worn over cashmere leggings, beige balaclavas… in general, it’s a more utilitarian vision, one that lets in some non-chalance and spontaneity to the designer’s world. The look featuring a faux-fur coat, white tank-top and leather pants is to die for, too. For the first time, Mayner is dipping into the footwear realm, partnering with Reebok on a set of remixed Classic Leather sneakers. The resulting shape epitomizes the Hed Mayner ethos: the shoes are washed and then flattened by hand to create a loose, lived-in shape, some with a deconstructed tongue that wraps the upper. The off-the-radar designer, gatekept by the industry insiders, is about to blow up.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Self-Expression. Wales Bonner AW23

January 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For autumn-winter 2023, Grace Wales Bonner delivered one of the best collections of the season. “Somehow, I feel like being away from home, in somewhere like Paris has this romance and grandeur about it.” Wales Bonner‘s show took place in an historic suite of salons at the Hotel D’Evreux. This hallowed site is at the very corner of the Place Vendome, the heart of haute French luxury. It couldn’t have been a more intentional choice of backdrop for the aspirations of this most studied of young designers, who often repeats “bringing an Afro-Atlantic spirit to an idea of European luxury” as her mantra. Her abiding mission to elevate “Black male style; a very refined approach to masculinity” took on the Parisian sojourns of the American writer and intellectual giant James Baldwin, the fabulously wealthy young Maharaja and Maharani of Indore, and fanned out to admire the showgirl, style-maker and activist Josephine Baker. By immersing herself in their worlds, she said she found herself transported, not so much by the idea of literal references of costume as by the uplifting effect of the cultural atmosphere. “Thinking about what Paris as a place gave them license to do and express. This idea of freedom of self-expression, to define yourself.” Paris, she speculated, “may create space to have more license to be expressive.” The award-winning jazz trumpeter Herman Mehari stood in the middle of the apartment and played as a procession of sophisticated “Black flanuers” threaded its way through the rooms. First out was a strikingly precise black tailored coat with half its upturned collar in white. On its breast was pinned a brooch – one of several composites of baroque pearl and Ghanaian bead jewelry that studded the show with a sense of the ceremonial. Wales Bonner’s knack is for drawing her own clever intellectual line between past and present. Saturated as her pieces are with cultural symbolism, she always takes care that the way they’re put together is wearable and relatable. You could see that knack of hers as you scanned down an outfit – say, a precision cut tailored jacket, worn with cotton utility-type trousers and babouche slippers. Babouches walked the parquet in many variants; twinkling silver and sparkly and with Mary Jane straps on the toes for women. She also knows how to elevate the ordinary, or the generic, to give it her own stamp of cachet. Cowrie-shell decoration has been in her repertoire from the very first; now she deployed it as lines of embroidery on an oversized ecru peacoat, white on white. Half- French classic, half Wales Bonner classic. The leveling up, the equality of craftsmanship across cultures is also what Wales Bonner is about. Her casual wear has her intellectualism coded into it too. When you’re wearing a Wales Bonner collegiate jacket with the words Sorbonne 56 sewn onto it, you’re referring to the First Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Paris, to which James Baldwin was a delegate. When sporty, there are also genuine cultural connections. Wales Bonner’s designs for the new Adidas soccer kit for the Jamaican team was showcased.