style

Men’s – High School Lovers. Alled-Martinez AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Ending this menswear season with one of the emerging Parisian brands, Alled-Martinez, which after last season‘s success continues to celebrate and embrace queerness. After telling a story of love and tragedy between two men, Archie Alled-Martinez takes a less melancholic approach for autumn-winter 2022. “I was wondering what would it be like to have been openly gay during high school,” he told Vogue, “and how difficult it was for people in my generation to be themselves growing up. When I go online now and see all these queer kids, it warms my heart.” Alled-Martinez translated the high school codes of the early aughts into his garments. There are tiny tees, and tinier, tighter trousers, and perhaps most symbolically laden for those actually in high school in the aughts, jeans shrugged down so low that boxer shorts peek out from the waistband. Bruce Weber’s Abercrombie hunks come to mind, but Alled-Martinez has a more approachable look—think of this like a Hollister fever dream. Furthering the theme, he’s made tees that say Top, Bottom, and Vers. The star of this season, though, is Alled-Martinez’s film. Beautifully directed by Pau Carrette, the film chronicles a boy’s high school loves and losses. The designer plays a track and field coach, while guys run around in their tiny A-M outfits. Unlike many of the other fashion films we’ve seen during the two-years-and-counting pandemic, this one actually has a plot and resonates beyond fashion.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Extraterrestrial. GmbH AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

If Prada started the topic of statement outerwear for men this season, then GmbH joins the conversation with a major tailoring moment. Serhat Isik and Benjamin Huseby are perfecting the cuts of coats and blazers to a couture-level dimension. Take away the wonderful and brand-identifying regal strapping and fur and we are left with a soft 1.5 breasted jacket with a high lapel that fell loosely and beautifully down the body. When worn against the thigh-highs, these jackets’ skirting generated kink, but worn against pants they were differently but no less potently seductive. Let’s not forget about the extraterrestrial elements of the offering, like the disturbing alien shoulders and this sort of out-of-this-world drama conveyed by the garments (very “The Fifth Element“!). But the collection as well covers something much more personal to the Berlin-based designers. As Isik explained, it was the experienced tension between power and constraint in the atmosphere of their religious schooling as queer teenagers that prompted this season’s examination of wearable Islam-specific pieces such as the taqiya. The calligraphic Arabic was adapted from the talismanic exhortations, notes seeking protection that Ottoman soldiers would wear under their armor: Isik’s grandfather would write these out for the men of his village. “I think it’s all the codes we’ve been playing with since the start, just amplified. So you have the club kid, the flasher, the man who looks specifically Muslim. It’s the most formal collection we’ve ever done, but I feel it’s also the kinkiest and sleaziest in a strange way.” This collection definitely proves that Isik and Huseby’s first collection for Trussardi, which will be presented at Milan Fashion Week next month, is one to look forward to.

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.