The indie labels stand out at Men’s Fashion Week in New York
How about one of these days some fashion maverick makes a radically ironic move — sends out, say, a Lawrence Welk collection shown on models sporting toupees?
Welk, for the benefit of ... well, practically anyone not in assisted living ... was the son of dirt-poor North Dakotan German immigrant farmers who earned enduring fame on a television variety show that ran unendingly in the 20th century.
One longtime sponsor of the show was Geritol, a dietary supplement advertised as a remedy for “iron-poor tired blood.” Is it premature to suggest the sophomore season of New York Fashion Week: Men’s could use a dose?
Based on the first several days of shows and presentations, there is no question things need some pepping up. Expectations were understandably high for the reinstatement of New York on a roster of international menswear shows; and given the placeholder quality of the recent European shows, the field seemed wide-open for some brash innovator to make a mark.
To be sure, there have been some creditable efforts, particularly from obscure indies like, say, Mike Rubin — the designer for the novice Krammer & Stoudt label, which came out of nowhere for Monday’s New York Men’s Day with a witty collection mashing up inspirations that ranged from the German neo-expressionist artist and dandy Markus Lupertz to Rubin’s surfer boyhood in Orange County, California.
The results were a hybridised, distinctly So-Cal take on “athleisure” wear, things like a grey cotton-jersey suit whose jacket had no lapels and whose trousers resembled footie pyjamas, though without the feet. “You could put that on when you get out of the water after surfing and wear it to lunch,” Rubin said. Somebody book a table at the Ivy.
Style tropes from Northwest skate-rat culture were a point of departure for Derek Buse and Jo Sadler of the Los Angeles-based CWST, whose determinedly raggedy collection of “hobo chic” sportswear had the so-wrong-it’s-right look one associates with the best Japanese menswear design. In Sadler’s and Buse’s hands, clothes in imported Italian and Japanese textiles were outsize, dissonant (pinstripes over camouflage), layered and so offhand they seemed ill-fitting.
A pair of wool high-water trousers in a broad check, for instance, looked like what a clown might wear if he were sentenced to life in a penitentiary. A raddled, knee-length wool parka looked as though its wearer had gotten drenched in a Seattle downpour and then tumbled dry. These observations are intended as compliments.
The young designer David Hart based his latest collection of blanket-plaid jackets and trousers, soft sweaterlike blazers, suede jeans jackets and natty, two-button suits on a style he linked to John Coltrane or any of the other jazzmen Francis Wolff photographed in the ’50s for Blue Note Records, images immortalised by Reid Miles’ brilliant cover designs for that label.
Impressively resolved as the collection was (especially for a comer who started his label in 2013), it seemed perhaps unnecessarily safe, given it was meant as homage to true creative radicals.
The closest any designer came to that notional Lawrence Welk collection was probably Lucio Castro’s delightfully wacko assortment of mock turtlenecks, culottes, chequered shirts and chevron-quilted puffer jackets in colours that ranged from moss and tobacco to sickroom pink and acid green.
The basis for the collection was a group of photographs the designer came upon last year of caravan hippies camping at Stonehenge in the ’70s. And you cannot but admire the spirit of someone who claims to find inspiration in the dusty, dirty, stained and ill-fitting rags once worn by a group of pagan druggies roaming the English countryside.
“It’s two flannels, a navy cavalier twill jacket, white shirting from Italy, six looks total: That’s it,” Duckie Brown designer Steven Cox said backstage before his show on Tuesday.
True to his word, Cox gave a presentation that was fashion haiku. It takes a certain kind of brass to gather the most influential people in the industry into a loft and present them with a collection comprising just six looks.
Yet so subtly had Cox and his partner Daniel Silver manipulated scale, made minute alterations in the formula that is a man’s suit (a puffer parka, stuffing removed, was worn under a jacket as a shirt) that their collection came off as an airtight argument for short-form fashion and self-editing.
If not for the cold dread that settled over attendees at Joseph Abboud’s purgatorial show Monday, there might have been something comical about the contrast between it and the pared-down Duckie Brown one that followed.
Making a welcome return to the brand he founded in 1987 and left in 2005 — having lost the right to his name — Abboud presented a collection of tailored suits so gratuitously detailed (buttons marched up the sleeve of one velvet jacket from cuff almost to shoulder) and seemingly overwrought that even the efforts of gifted stylist Bill Mullen couldn’t salvage the situation. There is only so much a person can do with a pheasant feather brooch.
Guests included actor Russell Tovey, now starring on Broadway in A View From the Bridge; Bravo personality Andy Cohen; and New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman. Each made a show of politely observing a procession of time-warp suits seemingly little altered from those Abboud designed in his ’80s heyday.
And Edelman, in particular, knitted his brows in rapt attention as models like Will Chalker or Sean O’Pry strode past wearing corduroy cargo pants or chequered suits with bellows vents, as simultaneously the eyes of certain other front-row regulars rolled back in their heads.
The past can be a treacherous place in fashion, one of whose primary functions is to conjure an intensified present. It is one thing to make references to your own collection of priceless oldies, as does John Varvatos — a serious collector of vinyl. Just make sure the needle doesn’t get stuck. — New York Times
- See more at: http://www.themalaymailonline.com/features/article/the-indie-labels-stand-out-at-mens-fashion-week-in-new-york#sthash.3FpP2Avp.dpuf
About the Author
0 komentar