Men’s – Motopapi. Courrèges SS23

August 10, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The energy of the concise, item-driven modernity Nicolas di Felice brings to Courrèges is all over the spring-summer 2023 collection. “You know, back in the day, Andre [Courrèges] was speaking to the young generation. I knew from my first week that it was part of the house,” said Di Felice. “So I really want young people to be able to afford the clothes; to make it, let’s say, more accessible.” He grabbed a vintage zip-up scuba-fabric jacket which Courrèges had designed for men in the 1970s as an introduction to how he got started. “I found this in the archive, and thought, ‘This shape is amazing,’ but there’s no point in doing it again. So I wanted to mix this silhouette with a biker vibe, because I had a motorbike when I was young. I thought about how it feels to drive to the beach, or to a festival in the summer, or something,” he laughed. “I’ve been at the house for two years now, so I feel more comfortable to explore a bit more of who I am.” One thing about Di Felice is his knack for filtering lived experience into his minimal-seductive design. His collection captures all the features of young masculine body-con display that’s taken off this summer: tight-to-the torso leather jackets, twisted, cutaway T-shirts, slick moto pants in the house’s heritage-look black vinyl, gabardine polyester trousers and denims with a hint of bootcut flare. It’s his addition of the faux leather bondage straps across the front of jackets that adds a clever utilitarian twist. He demonstrated: “So what you can do is take off your jacket or poncho and hang them off your shoulder by the strap, like this. It came to me simply when I was one more time in a party, and it’s hot and there are not enough cloakrooms. I was like, ‘OK, um, so when I go in on Monday – I’m going do that in the collection!’” The lookbook shows the device in action – clothes gradually becoming cool-looking drapes toted from shoulders, until the last guy ends up naked, carrying all of his clothes. “Like he’s just come out of the water on the beach,” Di Felice grinned.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Cowboy, Reconstructed. Greg Lauren SS23

July 26, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Greg Lauren started the spring-summer 2023 collection by thinking about the cowboy: the archetype, the myth, and the real deal. It’s not all boots, denim, and big hats (though there is plenty of that). Instead, his collection, titled “Re-construct”, taps into his muse’s renegade spirit. “There’s something at the core of the idea of the cowboy that resonates with people that has to do with individualism, and the idea of the figure that doesn’t conform and has the courage to draw their own path,” he says. That individualism expresses itself in unexpected ways. The spring 2023 lookbook opens with a pale pink trucker jacket. It’s made from scraps of fabric that were discarded to make last season’s pink tuxedos. Through a process called stitchwork, these teensy bits of fabrics are patched together to make a textile that can be used to make a pink jacket for a cowboy. There’s a nice cyclical energy to that, which Lauren clearly relishes, after all, repurposing pre-loved materials is what put him on the map. The most interesting developments here are the contrasts. Consider baggy cargo pants and a relaxed blazer made out of herringbone fabric, or the many jackets with tails Lauren created this season out of denim, ivory satin, and, spectacularly, leather. Lauren had fun picking apart black- and white-tie dress codoes, playing with ways to make a tuxedo jacket or tails casual through fabrics. Make no mistake, it’s still elegant. The craftiness running through the collection – the continued collaboration with Gee’s Bend quilters, the top made of vintage Cub Scout shirts, the stitch work fair isle sweater – only underscores the designer’s maverick qualities.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Mirage. Saint Laurent SS23

July 18, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2023 season, Anthony Vaccarello came up with his best menswear collection for Saint Laurent. The clothes were brilliant and absolutely desirable. Of course, the setting helped. Vaccarello had decamped to the Agafay desert, an hour or so out of Marrakech. It’s a city with real significance to Yves Saint Laurent the man (he had two homes here, most famously Villa Oasis, nestling beside the Majorelle Garden) and the brand (Marrakech is the location of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent). And then factor in the show’s mise en scène: an epic and haunting circular light show installation designed by artist and set designer Es Devlin, which rose up from a mirage pond, and was erected atop the moonlike terrain. Still, a cinematic setting doesn’t mean a whole lot if the clothes can’t live up to it. And here was Vaccarello’s master stroke: present a collection which he said, just before the show, was, “for the first time, my most personal. It’s maybe less, let’s say costume-y, than it could have been in the past.” Vaccarello looked back 20 years to when he was a student in Brussels at the La Cambre art school, a time when the tautly drawn lines of Belgian noir were omnipresent in fashion. It gave a defined tailored silhouette, to be sure, but one with a softness and a crumpled sense of being loveworn. Vaccarello took his own sartorial impulses from his earlier years – “it was how I dressed in 2000. It was a look that I loved, and I wanted to recreate that spirit; I was missing that” – and married them beautifully to the classic codes of YSL.

Trenchcoats came sharply shouldered but with a beguiling fluidity to their silhouette, cut with a barely perceptible flutter to them, in black wool or pliable glove-like leather. Lanky pants started high at the waist then fell into an easier, wider stride, some with a satin-y tux stripe running down the leg, or styled like jeans but cut from the most luscious of velvets, both often partnered with delicate gauzy tops that clung to the torso. The le smoking was a constant and compelling refrain here. Vaccarello had updated the classic tux, utilizing all the inherent fluidity of YSL’s beloved grain de poudre fabric, while others were cut from the slitheriest and slippiest of lounge lizard satins. He shaped his jackets with a judiciously judged jut to their shoulders, then might finish them off by having them clasp the body via their double-breasted or wrapover fastenings, drawing attention to a slenderized waist in the process. Sometimes though the newness came from something of the past. The flash of male décolleté – Vaccarello’s models sported almost to a man their jackets sans shirts – was something he’d picked up on from looking at how house icon Betty Catroux preferred to wear her tailoring back in the day. Again and again, look after look, it became clear that there was something about the pleasure of yielding to all of this, finding a place of comfort, of peace and of calm. It’s why, Vaccarello said, he’d chosen Marrakech. Not because he wanted to do a YSL in Morocco tribute collection, but because he understood that the city had been a place of solace and refuge for Monsieur Saint Laurent, in much the same way that Los Angeles has become a place of rest and recharge for himself.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

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Men’s – Preppy Sailors. Thom Browne SS23

July 5, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The Thom Browne men’s show started with a chic happening: guests cheered as the likes of Anh Duong, Marisa Berenson and Debra Shaw scrambled to find their seats dressed in the finest TB tweeds. This group of brand muses acted as couture clients in the maison’s mock-up salon, as 34 boys came carrying numbered paddles like the haute couture shows back in the day. Prim and proper suit jackets in delicate fabrics and pastel hues came anchored by barley-there mini skirts (Miu Miu has a serious competition) and jockstraps in red, white and blue. The boys adopted the uniforms of sailors and surfers, as well as tennis players and cowboys, by way of Browne’s signature shrunken and supersized proportions. For spring-summer 2023, the designer headed to the South of France to develop his tweeds, which came perforated with denim, seersucker tulle, leather, lace and multi-coloured ribbon. All of this worked well with the nautical theme seen through a queer lense. The New York-based designer has long been a byword for gender non-conformity, he shrinks and swells masculine and feminine dress, collaging the two to craft an out-there wardrobe that still feels sophisticated and grounded to the idea of strict uniform.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Grow. Loewe SS23

June 28, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s safe to say that Jonathan Anderson’s spring-summer 2023 menswear collection for Loewe was the most mind-blowing moment of the season. Fashion is on the brink of entering the Metaverse, and arguably our human consciousness is already fused with our digital devices: Jonathan Anderson marked the moment with an intriguing exploration around the subjects of perception, nature and progress. “A fusion of the organic and the fabricated,” he called it. On the one hand, part of his collection was seeded, watered and grown over 20 days in a polytunnel outside Paris. Chia plants and cat’s wort, living greenery, were made to sprout from trainers, tracksuit bottoms, jeans, coats. A collaboration which Anderson forged with the Spanish bio-designer Paula Ulargui Escalona. And on the other: there was Anderson, toying with manipulating tech and his set to make this physical show appear to be a non-real, computer-generated entity when viewed via his livestreamed video and lookbook. “I like this idea of high definition, the idea of that you remove everything away from the clothing, and it becomes about silhouette,” he said in his backstage debrief. When you could drag your eyes away from the fascination of boggling at how Anderson had pulled off the verdant decoration, all was simplicity and clarity. Luxurious leather coats and hoodies, sometimes minimally tailored, and sometimes exaggeratedly puffed up. His ultra-desirable oversized sweaters, teamed with second-skin sport tights. Iterations of Loewe Puzzle bags, utilitarian cross-body and basket totes, dangling on logo ribbons: all of the above underscored his enormously successful talent at focussing on desirable items for the house of Loewe.

There was more to this picture than that, though: the ones who walked down the white, metaversial slope of the set with wraparound masks, or coats and T-shirts implanted with screens playing videos of people kissing, flocks of birds at sunset, tropical fish, flowers and winking eyes. “When you’re sitting on a train or in a cafe, everyone is looking at the screen,” said Anderson. “And in weird way, I was fascinated by this idea. What happens when a screen becomes the face?” At its best, stirring up cultural discussion is the job that fashion can take on. Anderson’s show and the waves it will make do just that. What he presented was less of a judgment than a question, though. “I think we should have a place to be able to talk about these things constructively,” he said. Pitting nature against tech isn’t a forward-thinking formula, as far as he sees it: “Maybe out of this through we can find progression somehow.”