PFW

Men’s – Strange Beauty. Dries Van Noten AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

While many designers have now returned to live shows, Dries Van Noten doesn’t want to do a show until the pandemic ends (or at least, it’s finally under control). He spent the season thinking about how the restrictive conditions are affecting his team. “A lot of young people don’t go out anymore, they don’t see a lot of people. Touching each other, making love to each other… it’s changed. I think it’s a collection where you really feel what state we’re in, and what we’re longing for. That is the desire we wanted to explain: the frustration,” he said on a video call from Antwerp. Shot by Casper Sejersen, Van Noten’s autumn-winter 2022 film featured a bunch of models getting tactile in a big mansion in Paris. There were close-ups of three real-life couples kissing: two men, two women, and a man and a woman, who all embodied the designer’s genderless objective. “I wanted to make it even more than gender-fluid, so you don’t even think about what’s menswear and what’s womenswear. In this collection, there are as many women’s elements as men’s elements,” he said of the wardrobe, an unrestricted mix of sequins, glitter, embroidery, and transparency with traditional wools and sportswear elements. “There’s a little bit of sex, maybe, in the whole thing. It’s a surreal beauty, a raucous beauty – not a normal beauty. A very strange beauty. Just beauty-beauty is pretty, and I don’t like pretty. I think that’s boring,” Van Noten stressed, explaining the gender-bending quality of the collection had a lot to do with his investigations into truly genderless cutting. The raucous beauty Van Noten wanted to convey was there in the sort of tattered glamour he’s been practicing for a while now: wardrobe constellations that look a little bit like something you’d find in a thrift shop in a clubbing district in the 1970s; a helter-skelter of patterns, textures and partywear that feels somewhat psychedelic. “It’s not like, oh, let’s surprise people, let’s put a feminine thing on a guy. No, we don’t think like that anymore. There’s a freedom, which I’m happy with,” he reflected. “We combine everything in a very spontaneous way.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Sublime Gardener. Dior AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

I really loved Kim Jones‘ autumn-winter 2022 menswear collection for Dior. It might come as a surprise that Jones, who has devoted most of his Dior collections to collaborations (which sometimes feels to predictable) with artists and writers, approached his 75th anniversary homage to the house as a one-man show. “We’ve done a Birkenstock, but only because we didn’t want to do a Christian Dior gardening shoe and copy it,” the designer told Vogue. In true grande maison style, Jones erected a life-size copy of Pont Alexandre III in a tent on Place de la Concorde, just a stone’s throw from the real one (not a very sustainable approach…). The nasal might of Christian Dior spoke on the soundtrack with godlike authority as Jones’s interpretations of the couturier’s signature silhouettes bathed in his favorite “Dior gray” strolled along the bridge’s banister. It was a straight-forward exercise: from the Bar jacket to the wrap coat and the cannage, Jones worked each of the Dior icons into something that would resonate with a contemporary male customer. “It’s really complicated pattern-cutting but it looks so simple. That’s the beauty of it,” he said, pointing at one of the jackets on his board of looks. A series of Bar jackets and coats constructed like men’s blazers with white stitching that looked almost frayed had a deconstructed character to them we don’t often see at his Dior. It suited him. But mainly, it was nice to see a Dior collection that was purely Jones, somewhat similar to his debut from a couple of years ago. A collection like this may not receive the hype of last season’s Travis Scott collaboration (the release of which has been indefinitely postponed due to controversy surrounding the rapper), but in its Dior-core it will serve to enlighten new audiences in what the house historically represents. “I think young people want to learn about things,” Jones said. “The thing about Dior is it still looks modern when you see pieces from the archive. That’s probably why it’s still here, and so big.” He took his bow with milliner Stephen Jones, who is celebrating 25 years at Dior, and reworked the founder’s beret for the heads of Jones’s models.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Strobe. Rick Owens AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

“I’m not the kind of designer that says, ‘I just went to China and this is my inspiration‘. But I just went to Egypt, and they have those shapes, those beautiful shapes, and I thought if I did that as a Dan Flavin helmet, that would be so cool.” This is how Rick Owens summed up his out-of-this-world, ethereal autumn-winter 2022 menswear collection. By combining the headwear profiles of Ancient Egypt with some adroitly applied Philips light bulbs, Owens created headpieces that doubled as lamps – “they’re all free-standing.” The on-and-off-again lighting meant that much of the detail was suppressed from the eye: what was left were silhouettes. These were masculine, wonderfully unconventional and diverse, and ranged from Owen’s originally parodic mega shoulder to whorled arthropod curlings rendered in piumino. He compared the Land Art of the 1970s to the emerging meta-stuff, but remained refreshingly detached. Much more passionately he dug deep into the Made In Italy provenance of his pieces, dishing detail on the family companies that fashion his progressive fashion with artisanal techniques. The great upside of this, he hinted, is that it advertises traceability. “That’s information that’s important. And I like being in a company that is talking about that, but which is also saying ‘We’re not that good at it, but we’re trying.’”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Virgil’s Dreamhouse. Louis Vuitton AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

During his eight collection residency, Virgil Abloh, who passed away in November 2021, turned the house of Louis Vuitton upside down and inside out. He made the exclusive inclusive. Autumn-winter 2022 collection apparently marked the final segment of that arc, and in the set at least it appeared to come full circle. The collection was named “Louis Dreamhouse“, and around the runway were scattered the upended elements of a house that had been hit by some enormous force of energy now spent. In one corner was a staircase, from which opening dancers bounced up and down on hidden trampolines. An empty bed rested alongside the roof and chimney, from which a homey puff of steam emerged. On the other side of the roof was a long dining table, down which sat the Chineke! Orchestra musicians whose performance of a Tyler the Creator-composed piece contributed swooningly to making the show so moving. On the wall above them a stopped clock read the time as eight, on the dot.

The collection unfolded on 20 dancers and 67 models. Abloh’s great gift as both designer and lightning rod – masterfully to navigate an elusive commonality of commodity and community in order to service the former and uplift the latter – was posthumously still very much alive, even when referencing death. The inclusion of a Jim Phillips-esque Grim Reaper graphic was a breathtaking detail from a man designing his own legacy while gazing upon his own mortality. Bags came shaped as bouquets. The closing four all-white looks, some featuring Leonardo-esque wings, required no interpretation. Then there were the two tapestried looks, one on a topcoat, the other on an acutely waisted parka, upon which were reproduced De Chirico’s The Melancholia of Departure, a piece the artist created multiple versions of. These, said the notes, were illustrative of the 2020 Abloh-termed concept named “Maintainamorphosis,” defined as “the principle that ‘old’ ideas should be invigorated with value and presented alongside the ‘new,’ because both are equal in worth.” Returning then to the “old,” it was back in June 2018 for collection 1, his very first for Louis Vuitton, that Abloh transmitted multiple references to The Wizard Of Oz, all of them specific to Dorothy’s dream. As members of Abloh’s design studio came out en masse to a standing ovation after his very last collection for Louis Vuitton, they stood within the inside-out of Abloh’s cyclone-scattered dreamhouse.

What an irreplaceable force he was. Gone too soon.

Virgil Abloh / 30.09.1980 – 28.11.2021

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Body. Y/project AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

There was a lot to unpack in this men’s autumn-winter and women’s pre-fall 2022 Y/Project show. This must be why it was held in a spaceship-sized logistics artery on the northern edge of Paris that every day, all day, connects freight trains and trucks bringing goods into the city with 23 loading bays’ worth of courier vehicles. The epic venue offered beyond-enough room for social distancing. And it made for a runway so long that by my watch it took a full four minutes for the models to transit from one end to the other. Amongst the models were two fashion insiders that are close to Glenn Martens: Camille Bidault-Waddington and Olivier Theyskens. Theyskens said just before the show started: “Glenn proposed it to me. I know him and I love him. We work in the same neighborhood and we both come from Belgium.” The next highlight of the collection: the creative presence of Jean Paul Gaultier. Next week during the haute couture presentations, Martens will moonlight as a one-season only creative director for Jean Paul Gaultier. At this ready-to-wear show, Martens presented first hints of the dialogue: “We took one of his most iconic prints and we interpreted it in a Y/Project way. It’s very layered – you have men’s prints and women’s prints and they go on top of each other.” The trompe l’oeil body prints and penis pants that Martens was referring to, and which will be part of Y/Project’s Gaultier-facing ready-to-wear capsule, were certainly striking and worked well with the Belgian designer’s signature garment distortion.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.