FASHION WEEK RAMBLINGS - S/S 2016
by Eugene Rabkin
“Nothing,” answered a prominent New York buyer when I asked her what she liked during this past men’s fashion week. While I wouldn’t go this far, the Spring/Summer 2016 season was decidedly mixed.
The overarching question, which began forming in my head during the first day of shows in Paris was, “What makes a good collection?” Is it the theme or its execution? Do we look for a designer to tell an interesting story, to interpret a theme worth exploring through clothes, or to produce beautiful, interestingly constructed garments? Ideally, both.
Quite a few designers failed at this, beginning with Raf Simons. His own line has had a resurgence lately, as Simons seems to have finally realized that his fans want exactly the thing he’s been so good at since the beginning of his career – reflection of youth culture on the catwalk.
Simons picked as his inspiration the short cult film “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” which was also an inspiration for the recent Jamie xx solo album. Not a bad theme, but Simons’s execution in both the clothes and in the show’s production left much to be desired. It was not so easy to concentrate on the clothes with the models virtually running down the narrow elevated catwalk. Between their pace and the rags that covered their faces it is no wonder that some of them fell off the catwalk and into the crowd.
As for the clothes – who will want to wear the super-tight cropped sweaters and exaggerated high waist bell-bottoms is a mystery beyond my humble analytical power. The long belted coats with grommets were fine, but they were overshadowed by the cheesy looking plastic chains.
There were failures the other way around, too, at Dries Van Noten and Junya Watanabe. Both are masters of their métier, but even these two immensely talented designers cannot save a collection from an ill-chosen theme. At Dries Van Noten it was Marilyn Monroe – sad but true. In the pantheon of themes that should not be touched by anyone Monroe reigns supreme, along with Hitler, Mickey Mouse, and Kurt Cobain (all for different reasons, of course). That Van Noten sent down looks without even an attempt at reinterpretation (suits printed with photographs of Monroe all over, anyone?) has only made matters worse.
So was it at Junya Watanabe, whose show was held at the Museum of Immigration. As the show began I poised my camera for a shot that I never took. Watanabe’s theme was… well, I don’t really know.
What I saw were wan white boys in straw hats, clothes with African prints and African tribal jewelry. This fluctuated between absurd and politically insensitive, depending on how charitable you want to be (Guy Trebay said as much in his review for the New York Times). Images of English colonialism and everything that came with it flashed in my head. To be sure, Watanabe’s execution was flawless and his mastery of construction evident. But it was also a waste, and I could not help but wish that one day Watanabe would unleash his talent onto a better theme.
Julius was a brand that failed at both concept and execution. While I welcome Tatsuro Horikawa’s much needed departure from the slick, robotic cybergoth he’s been doing for the last few seasons, I fear he has taken the wrong turn. The show’s tribal theme felt forced and there were way too many loose, drapey things on the runway and too few garments a modern man could relate to.
Things did not look any better in the showroom. The entire collection looked like a diffusion line. Julius’s clothes used to be intricately constructed and of very high quality. Not this collection. Besides, as one buyer rightly said, you’d have to be basketball-player height to wear most of it...
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