ROMAIN BRAU, a founder of the avant-garde-and-beyond Antwerp store RA, where the most mainstream designer on the menu may be the Belgian conceptualist Walter Van Beirendonck, depends on creativity and young talent to lure the most curious of shoppers. London is often the place where he finds them.
“London is the best,” Mr. Brau said. “They have the structure and the sponsors to push those kids up.”
During a four-day fashion event that ended here on Sunday, dedicated for the first time to the city’s men’s wear designers, it was hard to miss Mr. Brau, a tall, slender, shaggy man wearing a chubby teal knit fur jacket over a sheer, bead-trimmed tunic and white long johns, which were tucked into his boots. On his head loomed a large bird, a tiara made of glittering sprays of peacock feathers, which he had to hold down to keep it from fluttering away in the breeze as he walked.
Eccentricity is common in fashion. And London, with its prestigious design schools and reputation for producing figures of enormous creativity like Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, embraces individuality more than other fashion capitals.
So it was somewhat of a surprise that many of the young designers showing here this week offered a vision that was, to say the least, conventionally safe, either rooted in strict tailoring or the animated prints and neon sportswear of the 1980s. Rather than a rebellion, they gave us shorts, and quite a few varieties of them.
A little rebellion would have been welcome, though it goes to show just how much London has changed from the days of Ms. Westwood’s incendiary, royalty-snubbing collaborations with Malcolm McLaren, under the Sex label, that she was among the designers who attended an opening reception last week at St. James’s Palace, hobnobbing with Prince Charles himself.
“Somebody suggested I might even be an icon of fashion,” the prince said at the party. “It’s taken me 64 bleeding years.”
Still, there was much to discover, and just enough to provoke, in London’s first fashion event for men, which kicked off the spring season and will be followed by collections shown in Florence, Milan and Paris. Mr. Brau cited a promising collection by Kit Neale, one of three new designers in a group show called Fashion East, with prints of orange crayfish and pastel bomber jets that recalled cartoonish themes of children’s bedsheets.
Jonathan Anderson, who is making exciting work under the label J. W. Anderson, designed gender-challenging twin sets and pajama-like ensembles of painted lace, including a black one that, for many of the American editors present, called to mind the Comme des Garçons shirtdress that Marc Jacobs wore to the Costume Institute gala last month. There were great presentations with varying degrees of inventiveness from Jonathan Saunders and the quirky design team of Meadham Kirchhoff, labels that are quickly expanding beyond the boundaries of London.
“There hasn’t been a men’s wear week here for as long as anyone can remember,” said Christopher Bailey, the Burberry designer, who gave a party at the company’s Brompton Road store, though he will still show his men’s wear in Milan. Several American designers also arranged parties or dinners, including Tommy Hilfiger, Tom Ford, Thom Browne and Italo Zucchelli of Calvin Klein. More than 50 London designers presented collections, either on runways or in showrooms around the city.
“It is an opportunity to showcase a new generation of designers and for other brands to get involved,” Mr. Bailey said.
In the end, what defined the disparate group who actually showed clothes in the inaugural event, called London Collections: Men, was not entirely different from men’s wear of New York or Milan.
The prevailing look, of vivid prints, board shorts, sweatshirts and athletic jackets, was derived from the West Coast streetwear and skater styles of the ’80s, reflecting the universal hipster fashion of the moment, as well as the influence of the New York retailer Opening Ceremony, which is opening a store in London this summer. The similarities between the collections could, at times, be striking.
In one example, it was at first amusing, then absolutely confounding, that so many designers showed models wearing shorts with black dress socks. In three days, there were at least a half-dozen, including Lou Dalton, Topman, Christopher Shannon, Richard Nicoll, James Long and Mr. Saunders, which suggests they are all looking at the same points of reference, more often magazines like Fantastic Man than GQ. They work in the same factories and showrooms, and often share ideas.
Eric Jennings, the men’s fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, said he was delighted nevertheless by collections that combined the traditional tailoring of Savile Row with a hipper, younger attitude, a category that retailers are calling “contemporary tailoring.”
There was a lot of that. Mr. Saunders included narrow suits in high-contrast pinstripes or eye-popping optical prints in his collection. Another highlight was the label E. Tautz, the ready-to-wear division of the Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons, which was acquired in 2005 by Patrick Grant, a young designer who sold his house and car to buy the fading design house. Showing in a wharf building on the east side of London, Mr. Grant came out on the runway and made a little speech about his inspiration, the explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who, upon encountering an Afar warrior with the dried testicles of his victims dangling from his belt, was reminded of a self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colors for cricket.
Strictly speaking, there was only one suit in the E. Tautz collection, which focused on suit jackets worn with shorts, and cotton sweatshirts and casual coats of thick canvas, made in shocking yellow, fuchsia and turquoise.
“The great thing about British fashion is that it is going in every direction,” Mr. Grant said. “In the past, people pigeonholed us as either dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists or streetwear designers, and they didn’t imagine anything in between. I think we have been a bit braver.”
Lou Dalton’s collection, which included dress shirts and athletic shirts with a minimalist aesthetic and a charcoal gray palette, was a good example of the seriousness with which today’s designers approach their businesses. The knock on London used to be that its designers, while creative, were unprepared to sell, or, as Paul Smith noted, “Most people thought that VAT meant vodka and tonic.”
“We are up against very big designers, and we like to think that our collections can be as relevant as theirs in the years to come,” Ms. Dalton said. “London fashion can be a beautifully cut sweatshirt or beautiful trousers, because at the end of the day, that is what is going to sell.”
But there remain some designers who will chafe at any signs of conformity, illustrating the split in London between following tradition and pushing boundaries. On that note we have designers like Meadham Kirchhoff, the label founded by Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff, who met as students at Central Saint Martins. At their presentation, the models, wearing layered amalgams of bright quilted jackets, embroidered sari skirts, athletic shorts, striped undershirts, gauzy tunics and the occasional floral-patterned dress, were sprawled on filthy mattresses among piles of junk-food detritus and rotting roses. It was a very decadent scene and, in a way, was a pointed statement about how globalized fashion has become.
“There is no idea of personal freedom or personal style anymore,” Mr. Kirchhoff said. “It’s something people have lost in London and around the world.”
Another new designer, Aitor Throup, went so far as to present his collection without actually showing any clothes. Mr. Throup, who pays his bills by consulting for labels like C. P. Company, has been developing his own label with the intention of introducing new designs only when he is ready, rather than seasonally. The one thing he presented, a sort of gray cloth handbag, in an overheated room that had many guests wondering if they were being subjected to a prank, was in the shape of a skull, with a zipper across the cranium and another connecting to the mandible. He has been developing the same bag since 2006, so several models were displayed along one wall, like an evolutionary chart.
It was a refreshing (if not potentially misguided) effort, a sign that individuality is not yet lost in a city awash in black dress socks. On that subject, none of the designers who were asked claimed to have any knowledge of how they happened to become such a trend. James Long, whose 20 outfits included nothing but below-the-knee, Japanese-inspired shorts with black socks, said he was as perplexed as anyone else:
“I’m not really a fan of feet anyway, so cover them up when you can.”
SOURCE FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/fashion/at-mens-fashion-week-in-london-a-changing-of-the-guard.html?pagewanted=all