Courrèges is gradually becoming a brand with a contemporary feel that offers some truly desirable clothes. All that thanks to Nicolas Di Felice, who with every season redefines what this French label is to a modern-day audience. The most important aspect the designer orbits around is the functionality of clothes seen through the lens of social observation. In the men’s autumn-winter 2023 (and women’s pre-fall) line-up, his thought process was triggered by watching the phenomenon of people hunching over their phones. “I’m really working on kind of a new silhouette that is really, like, bending,” he said. “It really seems like nothing, but actually it’s something, this reflection of us on our phones.” Somehow, that idea bloomed into a sexy and cool wardrobe. Technically, Felice’s inspiration of the staring-at-screens impact on human posture brought about a slight forward-tilt of the shoulder line – and the ingenious idea of inserting an invisible zipper extending to the elbow on the inside of tailored sleeves, “so you don’t have to ruin you clothes!” The lines of Courrèges are sharp, mostly dark, and cleverly sliced by Di Felice to adapt the original space-age minimalism of the founder for the new generation. That’s another of his talents: witness what he’s named “mini-skirt pants.” It looks like a plain black long-sleeved tunic, but there’s a narrow gap, high up on the thigh; a flash of flesh where the hem meets the pants. An incendiary item he proposes for all genders. Très cool.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Season after season, Jonathan Anderson keeps on delivering the most innovative, technically mind-blowing, disturbing – in a way great art feels! – and unexpected collections for Loewe. His autumn-winter 2023 line-up for the brand is the most brilliant and thrilling outing we’ve seen this entire menswear season. “I do feel like less is more. But in a new way,” said the designer. “I don’t think we’re heading into modernity like it was. It’s not like ’90s modernity; there’s something more peculiar happening.” For Anderson, clothes are the main objects of consideration – not the runway venue (a white cube showcasing artworks by contemporary artist Julien Nguyen became the perfect, harmonious backdrop), not celebrity appearances (it’s not easy to make the collection itself more attention-seizing than Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russel sitting in the f-row). This designer is one of the vanishingly few in the luxurysphere who believes that it’s enough to put clothes, and deep-thinking about them, first. It’s reached the point where it feels radical, avant-garde. “I think – I hope – that we’re going into a period where it is about being uncomfortable in design,” he added. “That we are trying to find something new.” This conversation was in his debrief, after a menswear show that proved, par excellence, that there’s nothing more absorbing and mentally exciting than simply being able to react to the meanings of what’s before you. And to witness configurations of stuff you’ve never quite seen before.
In Anderson’s world, the subject of clothes is multi-layered but startlingly focused on clarity; what be called “a reductionist act.” His collection was about exaggerating the materiality of fashion fabrication into the realms of pure-lined 3D sculpture – full metal jackets beaten by artisans from copper and pewter; stand away structured coats molded by hat-makers. What he’d done with the short, back-fastened shirts is quite a riddle. Some of them were rigid, wrinkled vellum – the work of traditional book-binders. Others were delicately made in hammered silk, a match for the boxer shorts, worn with nothing but leather ankle-boots. “I wanted the idea of something which is quite sensual underneath, with something quite hard,” said Anderson. Some of the boys wore angel wings. That’s where the reference spun sideways into the multiple art-historical/homoerotic sensibilities that focus Anderson’s vision. Partly, it was about resurrecting to modernity the iconography of old masters painters, specifically, the work of the French romantic allegories of Prud’hon and the link Anderson has made with Nguyen. His digital artworks – referencing traditional painting techniques – of Nikos, a Loewe model, were blown up in the center of the stage. What might end up sounding complicated was as distilled and to-the-point as could be. Anderson glorified Loewe’s craft skills in leather goods in textures of suede and shearling, shaved into sensuously tactile bulbous silhouettes in this show. But equally as head-turning were his pared-back, brilliantly on-the-money Loewe desirables: long, slimline coats in leather, and the reiterated wool shapes with deeply plunging cowl necklines. They were worn with a gesture—one arm out, crooked in a way which played on the mind like a memory of classical portraiture. Simple, but way out of the ordinary. Anderson felt that arriving at that coat had hit the quintessential mark. “Sometimes, by getting that one look, it helps you to create a narrative throughout the show,” he said. “There’s something in that it says everything and nothing at the same time“.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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. 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!
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