Man Fashion

Men’s – For The Individuals. Jil Sander SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

It’s an important time for the duo behind Jil Sander. Two-and-a-half weeks ago, Lucie Meier gave birth to a daughter. “It’s three of us now,” said her husband and co-creative director Luke Meier. Lucie hadn’t tried to hide her pregnancy, but since everyone outside her studio had only seen her neck-up on a Zoom call for the last nine months, no one realized. “I worked until a week before, but it’s good to be two,” she said. “Luke could take over.” They had begun working on their men’s collection some three months into the pregnancy, so, as Luke pointed out, “I don’t know if it’s conscious and present in the work yet.” The designers were, however, more reflective about the fashion world than normal. On a video call from Milan, Luke lamented fashion’s commercialization of parts of the sports – and streetwear that shaped him (he spent eight years at Supreme), and fondly remembered the eclecticism and individuality of New York street style in the early 1990s. “You’d see people on the street who’d be able to mix things like tailoring with an interesting piece of jewelry and something more functional like a parka. We were thinking about Jean-Michel Basquiat or Glenn O’Brien, these seminal New York characters,” he said. “Now, things are a bit uniform: there’s ‘this kind of person’ and ‘that kind of person.’ It’s nice to see people going for something that’s not considered the coolest thing of the moment.” While their collection was a reaction to uniformity, uniforms were undeniably present. Between utility suits, flight suits, strictly-belted tailored suits, and slender leather shirts with matching leather ties, there was an air of tonal, monumental dressing, which did go hand-in-hand with the industrial influences of the post-modern New Yorker artist wardrobe, but also evoked more symbolic uniforms of the post-war era. That wasn’t on the mood board, but the designers explained that the look they had in mind was about interrupting familiar or generic lines with pieces that express a certain individuality. That’s why colorful silken and fluffy foulards were tied around necks, why suits were bejeweled with jingly grape brooches, or why trousers were wildly magnified. It’s why a pink granny cardigan suddenly popped up, then a sexy cheetah print gilet, then a jumper motif that seemed to have zoomed in on a fragment of a multi-colored argyle pattern. Those graphic, color-block elements were nods to Donald Judd, whose SoHo building Luke would pass every day, admiring its Dan Flavin installation, when he lived in New York. After being stuck in the same places for so long, with the selfies of social media as our only real window to people-watching, this re-emergent period could trigger the individuality the Jil Sander designers are hoping to experience in the street once again. “I miss those characters and that world,” Luke said. “I don’t if it’s because we’ve been stuck inside so much, but I just want to see some interesting people.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Rave, Club, Have Fun. Loewe SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Jonathan Anderson‘s message for spring-summer 2022 is the following: go out, go clubbing, go raving, dance, have fun! And we listen. Inspired by the joy of nightlife and the freedom of club culture, his ecstatic new collection for Loewe is shot by David Sims and presented in book alongside a sister publication featuring the work of artist Florian Krewer. This season, shapes are both abstract and straightforward, meanwhile colours explode in a riot of saturated hues, high octane neons and acrylic shades. Sports-inspired pragmatism meets fluid forms, setting a party-ready, swinging tone. It’s clear it’s the menswear season of delightful hedonism (just take a look at the cosmic hippies by Rick Owens) – a sort of post-lockdown revenge, with a spiritual, even esoteric twist.

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Kim Meets Travis. Dior SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

At Dior, Kim Jones has collaborated with some of the finest visual artists out there, from Peter Doig to Raymond Pettibon and Daniel Arsham. But somehow this season’s joint effort with a 29-year-old rapper from Houston made the most sense. Travis Scott is one of the most remarkable musicians in the world right now, a Gen Z idol who embodies the esoteric fashion attitude of social-media culture and who has a child with Kylie Jenner. He is the type of celebrity who sits front row at Jones’s shows. But today the hip-hop community is no longer being dictated to by fashion. They’ve shifted that paradigm, claimed their rightful influence on the industry, and got behind the wheel. Scott’s collaboration with Dior was a manifestation of that evolution: a meeting between a creator and his muse, who hadn’t quite decided who had been cast in which role. “From the stage to the music, it was never just about the clothes but about the experience,” Scott said during fittings in Jones’s Paris ateliers. “It’s how you see and hear it, how you see the music.” He was talking about the live show production—which spliced memories of Christian Dior’s childhood gardens with the cactus-heavy Texan landscape Scott grew up around—but he might as well have been painting a picture of his own fashion understanding. Gifted with an instinct for styling, Scott has a personal wardrobe as distinctive as his sound. “It’s about taste, isn’t it?” Jones told Scott. “Some people have it, some don’t. Luckily you do!” The internet will give you endless get-the-look guides on Scott and his designers of choice, from Jones to Virgil Abloh, Phoebe Philo, and the cult Japanese brands that underline said esoteric fashion culture. Going forward, style tips can all defer to this season’s Dior collection, which was a medley of those influences. Jones explained it was inspired by the artist’s own look as well as his various creative outputs. “We had some hard design sessions for a couple of months,” Scott said. “I would draw graphics and send them to him. We sat down with mad refs, breaking down where we felt like we wanted to take it.” The palette painted a picture of Houston, its pink skies, green cacti, and the browns of the earth that have become trademark colors in Scott’s wardrobe. The silhouette felt rooted in the rapper’s penchant for a slightly oversized top paired with a flared pant, skinny but not tight. Iterations on tracksuit bottoms were particularly strong, tailored to precision and studded with cowboy-like metal buttons down the side. In a nod to that same cultural heritage, Scott had interpreted John Galliano’s saddle bag for Dior as a double bag that felt more rodeo than ever. Another of the artist’s signatures: patterns that evoked the rattlesnakes and desert flowers of the Texan plains. He had cacti-fied the maison’s toile de Jouy, while the ghostly motifs that appeared on tops were his own. “They’re imaginary things that kind of pop up in my head, and I draw them by hand,” Scott said, pointing to the same motifs woven in knits. “These are knitted by hand, which is so fucking nuts. It’s crazy.”
Talking about the trips he and Jones had taken to the Dior archives, Scott was clearly in heaven. “Me coming in and being able to have those in my hands…,” he paused, a smile on his face. Later, he effused about the wish-to-reality aspect of an atelier like Dior, which can literally make anything happen. “Making some of your imagination come to life, it’s kind of crazy.” His enthusiasm was visible in the collection, and that’s why it felt like such a shrewd match for Jones. Rather than applying an artist’s work to his own garments like he’s done in the past, this was the designer inviting his perhaps most influential Dior client to take an active part in the creation, from silhouette to motif and surface decoration. It was organic.

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – At Home. Dries Van Noten SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

“We were in, I think, the fifth lockdown here in Antwerp when we started on this collection. And when I talked with my team to discuss what it would be about, it was really about outbursts: We’ve had it, and now we want to have fun, we want to party, we want to enjoy things, we want to go into the city and we want to see people.” So said Dries Van Noten, laying out his manifesto for a sensually hedonistic season while simultaneously echoing the Peter Fonda–sampled intro to Primal Scream’s “Loaded”, the soundtrack to the line-up’s excellent collection video: “We want to be free to do what we want to do!… And we want to get loaded! And we want to have a good time! And that’s what we’re gonna do!” Without inquiring as to whether Van Noten and his team got loaded, they clearly had a blast putting together this lovingly local, energy rush of a collection. That team made a shared folder of smartphone photos taken around the city, from industrially scenic crane landscapes to strobe-lit club shots via moody pool hall milieus, which were integrated as prints on paneled parkas and silky shirts. These images were then accented against a ’70s vintage Antwerp municipal logo and etchings taken (with permission) from two of Flanders’s most famous sons, Breughel and Rubens. The collaged images on the garments were shot against a backdrop of more city locales, to 56 of which Dries and his team dragged a white podium to make the look book. Of them all, the pink-tabarded school trip in look six proved ultimate evidence that these were not scenes just lazily projected in post. Van Noten said his attitude to this collection was: “What is menswear? What is womenswear? Just throw it all together and take what you like.” Conventional dichotomies were rendered attractively void in “womenswear” looks featuring tailored, overlong, and overdyed pants in English mohair over slides, and an awesome “menswear” camo parka and suit in 35 gram silk plongée lined in cotton voile. Geographically specific to Antwerp, but tolerantly nonspecific in terms of the geography of received gender norms, this was a collection that did indeed look great to get loaded in.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Spiritual Escape. Rick Owens SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

It was almost a year ago when Rick Owens presented his first collection of the COVID-hiatus near his home on the Lido di Venezia. Eight months on, he held his fourth and last show here, drawing a final line in the sand to mark the end of this excellent Venetian mini-Owens-epoch and augur the rebirth of something like before that will not remain the same. To be precise, the lines in the sand were mostly traced by the stacked soles of Owens’s platform boots, which were cut down this season from thigh-high to mid-calf and outfitted with special side pockets in which to stash mini fog machines (emitting purportedly non-toxic, sustainable fog) and create a vivid vapor trail. The models walked the shoreline of the beach directly in front of the Excelsior Hotel, whose cabana-renting guests watched enthusiastically, creating an accidentally serendipitous backdrop. A few feet offshore were installed four powerful waterjets, which spurted joyful blasts of seawater up, up, up into the flawless blue sky. Those vast and joyful ejaculations aside, the chief conceit here were the three sizes of portable fog machines after which this collection, “Fogachine,” was named. “I fixated on the whole fog thing because we are entering a period of celebration. And I just love fog in its ambiguity. It’s got religious overtones, it’s got amyl nitrate overtones, it’s got stadium rock concert overtones…and they’re all these celebrations of everybody getting together to reach a different level of experience, a different supernatural level.” As the twangily twisted techno soundtrack by Mochipet fired up, the models began their promenade. The opening look’s boxily baggy pant was a key silhouette piece for the season, and was worn under a panel-slashed eco-cotton bodysuit. Both were undyed and off-white, a highly unusual hue for Owens, as was much of the collection that followed – a natural, softer-than-often touch the designer meant to reflect a softer-than-usual sentiment beneath. As he said: “I sense this moment of excess coming, that I can’t really participate in because I’m not an excessive guy anymore. But anyway, I had recently said that I thought we had learned some humility in the recent past – however I don’t think we did. But I am suggesting that we still can, and that is what this collection is about. It’s softer. It’s hedonistic, but I hope it’s a responsible, gentle, nice hedonistic. Although of course I am always looking on the dark side. And you know, I was able to satisfy all my appetites and I would never wish for anybody else to be deprived. But I am a little leery of the intensity that is going to come.” Owens’s fog-fugged vision of sustainable, humanistic hedonism came clad in silk topcoats in panels of vaporous opacity that were ripped at the armhole and hip to create jagged scars of canvas and horsehair. There was a shamanically pagan piece of evening wear in a cock feather jacket made by Maison Février, the Parisian plumassier to Josephine Baker. There were foggily diaphanous nylon hoodies, and patchwork Japanese denim from an originally 16th-century mill that was worn with unlikely propriety, and almost ceremonial dignity, with a pair of delicately clutched opera gloves. More Japanese denim, this time 16 oz. and woven on vintage Sakamoto looms, provided a fiery punctuation mark in its orange weft, pink warp manifestation. Animalistic texture was rendered in the monochromatic hard-shouldered coats in by-product sustainable Pirarucu dragon-scale leather. Owens said one big influence for the collection had been the mystically fierce aesthetic of Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin. “It would be disappointing to go back to excess. Next season all of the houses are going to want to show their flex. And we’re going to join in too – we’re gonna flex – and I don’t know how exactly we will be able to manifest everything that we have learned, but we’re going to have to figure it out.”

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.