Men’s – (Extra)Ordinary. JW Anderson SS24

June 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jonathan Anderson introduced the world of rugby to Milan Fashion Week yesterday when he took his bow wearing Ireland’s unreleased shirt, by Canterbury, for this September’s Rugby World Cup in France. “It’s because it’s father’s day today, so I thought I would,” said the designer. Willie Anderson, Jonathan’s dad, served as captain of Ireland’s Rugby Union team. That sweetly personal nod to the intimacy of our experienced domestic worlds ran through a collection that was rooted in Anderson’s own cultural experience but which also resonated more broadly. As ever at JW Anderson, the subject is approached in provocatively perception-altering ways. The set and backstage were decorated in the massively blown up blue and white stripes of Cornishware, a ceramic style once all the rage across the British Isles. This, said Anderson, signaled “conformity, things that are part of the household and become part of the psychology… things that are around you and become part of you subconsciously.” The ordinary becomes extra.

Rugby shirts, obviously central to Anderson’s own childhood experience, were bolstered with Bar jacket style hips and presented in knit or stiff jersey. Sweatshirts, fine knits, came with massively oversized v-notches that were then cut-out. In looks 44 and 48, these were knit in a nubbly weave inspired by the ’70s sofa in Anderson’s office. Schoolboy shorts (a theme seen earlier at Prada) boasted enough room for a spare leg at the left hip, thanks to a flying buttress of extra material at the side. Knit sweaters and dresses came with two bolsters, filled knit panels that snaked diagonally up the front of the torso like the homely spiraling baskets Anderson was inspired by. There were waxed knit shoes and waxed knit clothes in a mesh that vaguely resembled fruit bags and old-school collapsible shopping totes. Anderson estimated that around 70 per cent of the collection was knitwear. The wittiest of knits included tops fronted with what looked like balls of yarn – because they were. “Knitting has become such a craze and this is going back to the raw materials.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Skimpy, Gritty, Modern Sensuality. Prada SS24

June 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

(To experience the full version of this collage, check out my Instagram!)

It’s Prada day, meaning: a polarizing collection that makes everything else happening in Milan feel blunt and plain. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a menswear collection that can’t be easily classified in a couple of words. It’s utilitarian, but super-sensual, gritty, but somehow also polished, oversized, but skimpy too. You kind of want to hate it at first, but then… you get it. The third look – a fringed print white shirt and black schoolboy short – had just passed by on the industrial meshed steel runway. Suddenly, irregular lines of slime started oozing from the ceiling, falling on either side of the models. It settled into a pale green puddle as it slowly drained away. In its free fall sticky state, the gunky stuff that waterfalled down looked like something left by the alien in Alien, or a snail, or humans… after having a good time. “Now, in this time, we have to inject fantasy again, ideas,” Mrs. Prada afterwards. Together she and Raf Simons dressed their spring 2024 men in outfits that echoed the relationship between that rigid runway mesh and the glinting plasma that spurted from and through it. The starting point was a tailored silhouette featuring broad shoulders bolstered by (removable) pads, a cinched waist, with elongated jacket skirts and sleeves. Below were high waisted bottom halves that (when not hemmed as shorts mid thigh), ballooned around the groin from the naval thanks to generous side pleats before tapering down to the ankle.

Simons said that this silhouette was meant to echo the heroically enhancing tailoring paradigm of the 1940s. It was Prada-fied through a process of reduction and enlightenment: archaic heavy wools were upgraded with ultralight modern equivalents, and instead of the heavy architecture of tailored construction, those jackets were as unconfining as the lightest poplin shirt. “When we think about the body we also think about the idea of the inside and the outside, about the way a body is not still. Very often in the sartorial, it ends up being a very architectural construction and the body is partly restricted,” concluded Simons. Through and from this heavy-looking but ultra-light starting point, other elements began to push, ooze, or burst to the surface. There were those floral shirts, whose fringing and sleeves took them one evolutionary Prada step beyond its signature Hawaiian shirts. There were traditional shirts that had been subject to a freakish growth spurt, transformed into full length coats. There was a section of constriction free denim jeans topped by functionally expansive multi pocket work gilets and then fine-gauge knit shirting in navy, through which luxuriant furry tufts appeared to be sprouting. Being Prada, this menswear collection was designed to stimulate the cerebrum as much as any other body part. But it was also consistent with the recently-repressed animal urge also unleashed at DSquared2 this menswear season. Masculine sexuality, of whatever flavor and inclination, is coursing through the runways of Milan once more.

Men’s – A Little Life. Valentino SS24

June 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Pierpaolo Piccioli‘s spring-summer 2024 menswear collection for Valentino felt statment-less, even though it had quotes from Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” printed on some of the garments. That return to actual clothing, and not a big theme, felt refreshing, because the last couple of Valentino collections were overloaded with meanings and ideas. Staged on a regular school day in the garden of La Statale, Milan’s public university housed in a beautiful Renaissance building, guests (and students) watched the show in the hot Italian sun. Piccioli was drawn to “A Little Life“‘s take on contemporary men so much so that pink-hued copies of the book were sent out as invitations to the show. “The intimacy and humanity of the four male characters, their open vulnerability and resilience was touching and inspiring for me,” he offered. The show pivoted on Piccioli’s easing of classic masculine tropes, subtly subverted through a gentle approach. He worked on sartorial codes, softening the proportions of boxy blazers, replacing trousers with short shorts and skirts, embroidering flowers on lapels or printing blown-up blooms on breezy light jackets and straight-cut shirts. Piccioli’s artistic flair for a pictorial palette – mint green, raspberry, turquoise and hot pink alternating with black and white – emphasized a sense of individual vitality and an attitude of romantic freedom.

IRL. ERL SS24

June 16, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Eli Russell Linnetz is the Sam Levinson of fashion. He knows how to stir a controversy and lure the audience with aesthetics. The ERL lookbooks from the past seasons are great examples of that. But does the Californian designer know how to sustain a plot? His first IRL runway show at Pitti Uomo’s Palazzo Corsini in Florence make you question that. The juvenile faced Linnetz-cast cadre of real-life surfers from his real-life Venice Beach neighborhood walked down the neon-green venue in stardust-sequinned tailoring and silver lurex knits. The Uncle Sam-meets-Slash top hats and ’70s shaped tailored topcoats and shirts worn over starrily-spangled “wetsuits” created an impression in clothing that was only reinforced by the thwup-thwup of Huey rotors and Jim Morrison predicting “The End” on the soundtrack. As Linnetz concedes, his experience and instinct both lean towards costume as a form of messaging. It did feel like on set of David Lynch’s set of “Dune“. Accessories included hyper swollen reimaginings of the Etnies/Emerica/Globe style of early ’90s puffy skate shoes, plus some very Linnetz-specific rubber-framed eyewear that looked more like goggles than sunglasses. There was an irony embedded in ERL’s first real-world collection being so hyper-unreal; beneath that lurked a point of view about American masculine identities, hang-ups, and brittle wearable projections of power. But the general vision felt too misty and too Vetements-y.

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.