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. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
For the last couple of seasons, Anthony Vaccarello has been delivering his best womenswear collections for Saint Laurent. He’s starting to refine (and redefine) the menswear line as well. Long, tall, lean – those were the words that spontaneously shot to mind while the designer was sending out the autumn-winter 2023 collection that swept away the gendering of clothes with every passing flick of its floor-grazing coat-tails. At Saint Laurent, it was instantly very clear: Vaccarello has been building on the dramatically attenuated silhouettes that have been striding out at his women’s collections recently, and their transference into menswear is now complete. “I really want them to be almost one person,” he said. “So women could be the men, and the men could be the women. No difference. I want more and more to put them at the same level. No distinction.” While the audience reclined on a circular banquette, sipping Champagne at the perimeter of a beige center-stage, it was equally apparent that Vaccarello was speaking about his idea of what drop-dead elegance means to people of his own generation. In material terms, that translates to dark, vertical, narrow coats; black leather and velvet; necks exaggeratedly tied in flourishing bows or sunk funnel-necks; the cool, tailored swagger of Smoking jackets, the cache-coeur drape of tops and chest-revealing cowl-front silk shirts that plunge into wrapped cummerbunds. Whereas what was for “her” was pioneeringly co-opted from “him” by Yves Saint Laurent in the 1960s and ’70s, now Vaccarello has reversed the process in the 2020s. Of course, the codes of the house offer endless gifts to play with on the menswear scale: patent block heels, adaptations of the pussy-bow see-through chiffon blouse, a hint of the North African draped hood. Vaccarello did all that, with a confidence and conviction that is all his own. What’s progressive about it is the way he’s pushed past anything that might be categorized as “blurry,” “fluid” or “neutral.” In the bigger scheme of fashion, his contribution is bringing exactly the opposite qualities to rethinking clothes and gender: what Vaccarello deals in is rigor, precision, and a brilliant ability to cut. It was a true Saint Laurent on-brand orchestration (with a little help from Charlotte Gainsbourg, who while wearing a black velvet tuxedo played on the piano in the middle of the Bource De Commerce venue), for sure, but a resonantly relevant step forward for the designer too.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Anthony Vaccarello is staying close to the obsession he’s been evolving lately at Saint Laurent: the super-chic and ultra-elegant flowing, languid, maxi silhouettes. The silk skirts are floor-sweeping, the boxy coats are long, the eveningwear is all about the body-clinging column. For resort 2023 (which serves as a sweet entrée to the fabulous spring-summer 2023 fashion show collection), all the YSL-isms are here, but adjusted because Vaccarello has that ineffable way of remaking their proportions to feel totally right for the moment we’re in. Like the draped cocktailania of Monsieur Saint Laurent’s ’80s and ’90s reinvented into tiny dresses and just as tiny bodysuits. Vaccarello has been busy perfecting his drapery style for some time now. What else resonates here, what gets that eye fixated on the proceedings, is how this collection tackles the twin pillars that the house of Saint Laurent was built on, the mid-century couture-era codes of tailleur and flou, that are the very guiding principles of French fashion. Vaccarello gives the collision of those two approaches a very distinctly personal spin: gorgeously frothy chiffon dresses, with flouncing hems come with cabans embellished with blowsy blooms, or beaten-up leather bomber jackets. Heritage, tradition, and craft, but handled with a snap and crackle. This is an example of really good in fashion in 2023.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
You could say that Yohji Yamamoto‘s sublime autumn-winter 1998 lineup was about stretch. There were a lot of knits, both of the loving-hands-made-at-home variety and luxurious jerseys. Yamamoto explored the draping possibilities of the latter, but he also combined jerseys with more static woven materials. Post-show the designer told The Daily Telegraph that his idea was “to experiment with the ‘delayed’ reaction of certain fabrics contesting the movements of the body.” With the exception of the finale, bridal look, this was a relatively sporty show, even when it came to dressing for evening. To highlight that, Vogue photographed Angela Lindvall leaping through the Irish countryside in a knit ball skirt and ribbed turtleneck from the collection (obsessed). For the most part Yamamoto’s historicisms referenced the 20th century (the cargo-pocket peplums looked like a pre–World War II silhouette) rather than earlier periods. The caged finale gown, with its hyper-exaggerated 19th-century proportions, was the exception – and exceptional in every way. It was even accessorized with Doc Martens. Sally Brampton, reporting on the show for The Guardian in 1998, recounted that “the bride billowed down the catwalk in a cream skirt so huge that journalists in the front rows had to duck down below the skirt, only to discover a bamboo cage strapped around her waist with canes radiating out from it. Four men held up the vast My Fair Lady picture hat that floated like a snowdrift over her.”
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