Men’s – Full Bloom. Dior SS23

June 27, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

At Dior, Kim Jones does what he does best: combining contemporary elegance with art references, creating menswear that’s profound and desirable. For spring-summer 2023, the show’s venue was about two houses, joined by a garden in full bloom. Jones’s models were wending their way through the greenery from Granville in Normandy on the coast of France to Charleston in Sussex in the rural south of England. The designer had found yet another pathway to connect the patrimony of Christian Dior with his own Englishness, via his own obsession with collecting the arts, crafts, and literature of the early 20th century bohemian Bloomsbury Group. Charleston Farmhouse was owned by the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who pursued their early 20th century free-love gender non-conforming lifestyle with guests in the isolated countryside away from London. Being English, Grant also adored cultivating the garden. Kim found a way to merge his translations of tailored Dior-referenced couture refinement with relevant, relatable, outdoor technical kit. This has always been Jones’s home territory as an experienced designer who was born to a love of traveling, trekking, and living outdoors. That’s his appeal to a huge young global fanbase. There were double-layer shorts, backpacks, zippy camo-jackets, poshed-up gardening hats and Dior ankle-length wellies. Sweaters – his Dior seasonal collectibles – were based on the artworks he owns by Duncan Grant. Where we saw Christian Dior himself was in the tea-rose and gray palette; a salute to the romantic legend of the haute couture house. Dior was raised amongst the roses of his mother’s garden at the Granville house, which his family lost in a 1930s crash. Those roots might not matter all that much to a modern viewer, but Jones is always conscious of keeping those roots alive.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Paris. Ami SS23

June 27, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2023, Ami went for the timeless, effortless and somewhat cliché, but always très cool theme: the Parisian chic. For the fashion show, the guests were at the top of Paris, in the grounds of La basilique du Sacré-Cœur with the city laid out below, gleaming in the sunny dusk. Catherine Deneuve and Carla Bruni were in the audience alongside Naomi Campbell and Jonathan Bailey. Extraordinarily, Audrey Tautou – Sacré-Cœur’s Amelie herself – was lured out of her long public retreat to open the show. Other key cast members included Liya Kebede, Karen Elson, Precious Lee, Cara Delevingne, and Kristen McMenamy. We were in menswear week, yes, but hey. This was a power play as well as a Paris play. Ever since budget has allowed, Alexandre Mattiussi‘s shows have been elaborate, but last year Mattiussi took a clearly very significant investment from Sequoia Capital that ratcheted up the production values several levels tonight. “They’re young, cool, easy, and they let me do whatever I want,” he said: “they are super supportive.” This was reflected in the casting, the location, and the after-party, but also, most crucially of all, in the clothes. Ami was an exclusively menswear label from its founding in 2011 until as recently as 2019, when it expanded into womenswear. Mattiussi expanded his Ami wardrobe – the presentation of carefully idealized observational fashion via looks and pieces based on real Parisian types and stereotypes but then applied with a cleverly restrained patina of enhancement. There was a formidable array of bags, a new category, and shoes all intricately detailed with the logo that Mattiussi first doodled as a student. Multiple dialects of bourgeois archetype were gently mashed together to create a beguilingly approachable and good-natured French wardrobe. “It is still about sharing the values of love, friendship, fraternity, and kindness. And not trying too hard. This is what is natural for me as a person and designer. And it is a postcard again – the latest episode of Ami in Paris.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Fire. Rick Owens SS23

June 26, 2022June 26, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The Rick Owens spring-summer 2023 show gave armageddon vibes. Or at least that is what the three 2-meter-ish across orbs that were set alight by technicians, slowly lifted by crane high above the guests, and then dropped to a sizzling impact in the Palais de Tokyo fountain were there to represent. Ruminating during the line-out pre-show, Owens said: “the fireballs are flaming suns, arcing across the sky, and crashing to the ground. But I did it on repeat because it happens over and over.” He was referring to human fear of our extinction – whether through war, pestilence, or other generationally specific worst case scenario. “’I’m always trying to reassure myself that whatever is happening in the world right now – whatever conflict or crisis or discomfort – it’s happened before. And somehow goodness has always triumphed over evil, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here now.” Those words bring glimpse of hope especially in 2022, with war happening in Ukraine and Supreme Court’s outrageous overturning of Roe v. Wade. Something else that happens on repeat, way less cataclysmically, are remarkable Rick Owens shows. This was another. His level is so high and his language so distinct. Owens had been in Egypt and named the collection Edfu, after the site of the Ptolemaic Temple of Horus. However the only literal souvenirs of that journey on the runway today were the three top-to-toe tulle looks near the end, “because when I was there I was wishing I had a mosquito net caftan.” Instead his time in Egypt had got Owens thinking about how its cultural aesthetic had been revived again and again across the millennia since its inventors turned to dust. Owens tweaked his own codes, introducing a flared-upper version of his killer platform boot. Another novelty was technical wear, delivered in the loose pants, shirts, and inverted jackets cut in gray ripstop nylon shot through with Dyneema, a fiber Owens said was “apparently one of the strongest in the world. I find it reassuring.” A few pieces were produced with Paradoxe, a Parisian label that unweaves surplus or vintage denim and then applies the threads to other denim pieces to create a richly textured effect. “It’s almost like lace,” said Owens. There was an otherworldly jerkin in iridescent purple made of pirarucu, a food by-product of Amazonian fish skin. Owens purists might be reluctant to embrace his rare forays into punchy color, but the eruption of yellow, pink, green, and that purple here provided extra visual texture even beyond the steaming meteorites. The volumes, especially in the shoulder, were on the up again. For Rick Owens, this was just another judgment day.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Layered Oddity. Y/Project SS23

June 25, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

“It’s a bit like Gothic cathedrals, a Flemish vibe… like Bruges”, Glenn Martens described his spring-summer 2023 collection for Y/Project. Bruges is a tiny, ancient, weirdly beautiful city that never stops looking fresh because it was so madly built – depending on the time of day and the shape of your mood there are new angles of oddity everywhere. So Martens’s simile worked nicely. This stroll through Y/Project, held in the lush garden of an elite Parisian school on a raised gravel runway as shocked parakeets dashed above, combined his familiar symphonic weirdness with some stimulating fresh notes. The basenote remained distorted denim, imprinted with a so-cheesy-it’s-good Eiffel Tower logo that you wondered might be a gentle satire of the rumbustious graphics so favored at the designer’s day job at Diesel until he gently disambiguated that it had been in place here since 2013. There was a whole chapter of new trompe l’oeil pieces as a second season partnership with Jean Paul Gaultier. Instead of nudes this time the emphasis was on impressing the dressed-down – classic Y/Project jeans and vests and polos – on slips and rib-knits. There were hilarious flipped-finger earrings and four “evil baby” tops whose drawn-on distended bodies were based on a much-regretted tattoo on a drunk British guy that Martens had met while developing the collection. Possibly the most striking innovation of all – this season’s flying buttress – were the apparently impossible tank tops suspended at the shoulder by nearly invisible wiring. And yet the central architectural device underpinning all this seasonally-adjusted weirdness remained the malleable wire endoskeletons that allowed tailoring, denim, and alien eveningwear to be distorted into shockwave shapes. Like Bruges, it is worth revisiting again and again.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – What’s Modern? JW Anderson SS23

June 21, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jonathan Anderson is nailing it again, being in his surreal element. Back before Anderson started producing his in-your-face de-gendered mood-driven menswear in 2008 – the “shared wardrobe” concept that ironically led to him being practically frogmarched by his fans into expanding into in-your-face de-gendered mood-driven womenswear a few years later – he had plans to be an actor. That plan changed during an audition for Juillard in New York, where he performed a piece from the in-your-face ’90s play The Pitchfork Disney by Philip Ridley. Nearly a decade later The Pitchfork Disney, which he recently reread, was revived by Anderson as a central element in this first live Milan bow. Anderson said afterwards he’d been moved by “the shock of theater” that the play represented (some of the audience at its premiere in 1991 fainted) to shape a collection that tested our perceptions of clothing and modernity. The BMX handlebars, shattered skate decks and CDs were there to remind us of the intrinsic ephemerality of modernity, and its inevitable descent into anachronism. Anderson tried to add “eating canned goods” to this category of faded fads while speaking to the Italian press, but these pieces seemed more like witty acts of wearable assemblage. There was certainly a cheekiness to the project. The embedded bar codes made consumption provocatively both the ends and the means of engagement. “Fashion is a very modern device,” he said. “But it is not a modern act.” To underline the illusion of modernity he cast Rembrandt as the protagonist in his fashion play via intarsia reproductions on knitwear and prints on sneakers featuring the artist’s leery etching, Self-portrait in a Cap, Wide-eyed and Open-mouthed, from 1630. The nearly 400 year-old selfie stressed that while technology upgrades, the way in which we use it stays pretty constant. All these devices – along with industrial gloves, a stock photo of an apple-eating kid, and hardware-store door hinges – were placed within or adjacent to borderline generic contemporary canons of clothing. This created a have your cake and eat it result: you could wear JW Anderson-issued versions of 2023 uniform, and through those in-your-face interventions included within them simultaneously signal that you understood the narrative was entirely contingent – just a wearable moment in time.