Author: GG

Our traditional staff confabulation about a new Dries van Noten men’s runway show was cut short this week. A sweeping assessment, lobbed into our group huddle by a passerby, gave us pause. Could we better this reading of the Belgian master’s latest Summer offering? 

“It looks like those TikTokers. You know, the boys.” 

We didn’t. Interns shifted on their heels. A senior (paid) game-changer asked for more. 

“They wear boots with big heels, and flared pants, or girls’ clothes. And dance.”

And probably it’s true that the most remarkable aspect of this show for an American audience, who pass hours, in the midst of the death of Roe v. Wade, of leisure and pleasure in TikTok self-study of queer art, is its overt gestures to androgyny. But the selection of girls’ clothes, and they were for girls—bodycon dresses; camisoles—are the least interesting of the show, lacking as they are remarkable colour, print, or pattern. In this respect, there is, like an automaker fitting a gratuitous coachwork embellishment or producing numbers of a colour for a special export market, a carelessness to the play with gender in this season which could fool a viewer unaware of a career studded with brilliant explorations of the limits of binaries. 

We live in a challenging moment, even for papers specialising in fashion criticism without the aid of label press-kits. Thus the unwelcome interjection about the inspiration for the show. We have had to let some of our office space to a cryptocurrency company fallen recently on hard times. The young man who offered us his reading was typical for his type: swaggering, touchy on matters of (his) giving offense, and devoted to declaring the root of a thing. In common with his colleagues (all paid), this cryptomaven displays a remarkable self-education in criticism which took our unpaid interns years, several degrees, debts, and much fuss over the Frankfurt School to learn. While gyungyun staffers query the why and how of culture and society, the cryptoboys skip right to the tenure-track, by a brilliant back-to-the-basics reversal: they question the what. On the topic of a recent global health concern, we were (sort of) asked: “Monkeypox. Do you think it’s real?”

Unwilling to yield to such a simple explanation for a show by a designer whose works have  reached such thematic heights as Romania, the Piano, and Gypsies, our staff set to work placing the show in context. It is, after all, a parade of hybrities, but one which, to the relief of the long-term fan hoping to add to an established collection, offers plenty of familiar pieces. Set on a rooftop in Paris and accompanied by ominous masculine epic/conquest music, the models suggest the messy gender signalling at a fresh colonial outpost. 

We have the forever impressive tailoring in dark blues and deep blood reds, often pinstriped, occasionally with an all over print, shown brillianty here in a red double breasted suit with lighter floral pattern: a typical masterclass of cut and colour. But suits and long coats are combined with unexpectedly casual components; a long tailored shirt, untucked with tie, its sleeves removed. A utilitarian trench coat is paired with wide checked trousers but also lacks sleeves, as if in improvised solution to an unexpectedly extreme climate. Formal attire is incomplete, disassembled, or, characteristic of a far-flung province, sacrificed to lust. 

Perhaps rather than a colonial outpost becoming, we are viewing its unravelling. A wonderfully double breasted blue pinstripe suit, on closer examination not quite matching, is thrown into further confusion by an exaggerated text print scarf, reproduced throughout the show-including a long blue jacket-as if from a cafe’s advertising hoarding, the rougher section of a football team’s supporters, or a political slogan. 

Recalling the Paris-Dakar desert rally, another travelling circus of masculine temporalities on-location, a third motif is the motocross or racing suit. Here, though, we have a study of what makes Dries van Noten special. Where another designer might repurpose a kind of ur-example of a racing suit by using an easily researched template, adjusting logos, and scaling back colour to create a cheap irony, these pieces are much more closely integrated into the world of the designer. Leisure pants styled on moto prints in this show use, it’s true, some of the more garish aughts vernacular prints of the genre, but they are lightly feminised in a prettified pattern, or reproduced in a deliberately incorrect quilted fabric familiar to fans of the label. The most effective example of this series is a shining sequined bomber with contrasting dark blue cuffs. The activewear print is transformed by a slight magnification of pattern, gorgeous colour, and the jewel-like effect of the material. Smart. 

The Dries van Noten die-hards among us have bristled the last spring seasons at an encroaching collage print. It makes use of a deliberately under-styled (for Dries) pattern, like a piece of handsome upholstery or curtain fabric. Not quite of the sumptuousness or detail typical of the brand, these are applied in a collage effect, as if fabric samples have been tossed onto a floor for consideration. In t-shirts, long tunics and scarves these seem to us a rare misstep. We found most comestible in this group a parka, where just two contrasting prints are given space to develop their colour. It looks like the flag of the US state of Maryland. 

The show’s themes are reducible to its best look. A femininely-fitted light black sweater with a uniquely notched deep v-neck shows a simple, gender-contrasting maroon diagonal varsity stripe. So far so hybrid. The pants are of the best print of the show, a luminescent red feather on a darker red background, cut in a slightly oversized fashion amplified by the fitted top. A thick belt doesn’t match either, its palette somewhere between the top and the pants, which of course means it harmonises brilliantly, which is not to speak of the buckle, since it asks not to be seen. It is a gorgeous anti-logo belt, relying on a perfection of shape and harmony with the tailoring, the meeting of slim top and heftier pant, reflected in the large shape of the buckle which is cleverly made from a thinly shaped metal. Completing the look are the exquisite black top-leather mules which are a highlight of the collection. We don’t need all the looks of this latest show, but we anticipate snapping up this complete look, which is timeless and fluid Dries van Noten. 

What makes a Yohji Yamamoto summer season?  Absence of socks. An open collar exposing neck. Visible toes too, in a glimpsed sandal made, tellingly, like a blown-out leather shoe.  In a show of mostly black tailoring, including wool jackets and overcoats, these are minor seasonal cues evident only to the initiated, the converted, the already incarcerated. A school child bolted to a desk noticing with the turn in weather a schoolmaster’s unfamiliar tie. 

And there is a drowsy school day afternoon’s familiarity to these pieces.  An opening tailoring lesson is a pageant of the label’s evergreen standards: black suits with fitted breast and embellished shoulder (strap, contrasting material) widening to a just overlong hem meeting beautifully draped baggy trousers.  Second, a review lesson on print. A series of hazily figurative drawings blown up against an eerie green background, others disarmingly pair theatrical blood reds with corpse greys. These bruised renderings, applied to soft yet structured leisure suits, recollect aged, no longer distinct tattooing. Yamamoto’s conception of beauty is of colour, figuration and form in the process of becoming or unravelling.  It is a dialectic of gestation and decay.  The beautiful adolescent, stealing around to a loading dock where perfect cheeks concave greedily around a cigarette. 

Another revisited lesson is Yamamoto’s brilliance with the men’s collar.  The designer’s career could profitably be reduced to a study of his collars.  In this show we have a simple silk/viscose elegantly parted to reveal neck; endlessly foldable high collars which permit the wearer any number of sober, extravagant, and ornamental flourishes; a soft, almost Elizabethan standup collar like an aged garden border; and a series of incandescent indigo contrasting collars paired with black fabric. There is in this diversity alone, in these closures, the germ of dozens of fashion careers.  

Finally, these themes are combined to produce the most covetable looks of the collection. For example, a long beautifully collared heavy blue coat in silk with asymmetrical fan skirt. A sportier look combines those gooey art colours with patches of contrasting solid colored fabric. Elsewhere a striped black and white jacket and parachute pant combination suggests animal hides or a vintage automobile seat. Elegant, beautifully cut and as formal (or not) as one likes.

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Fashion today reflects our present age of “resistance.” Faced with unwonted legacies of supremacy and underrepresentation, American fashion media has promoted new, diverse, and historically excluded personalities and narratives. These efforts are evident from marketing to staffing, including, and especially, the models in our lookbooks. And yet, still we have just a handful of signature “super” models, and still, they are siblings. This is the product of an industry’s collective corporate strategy for global and social change: a hungover boardroom’s approval for a charity measure. 

Meanwhile, Yohji Yamamoto, an old punker making self-plagiarising clothes in runway shows which appear at first glance so similar that this reviewer supposed the video stream to have accidentally presented archival footage. What on earth could a stubbornly unchanging designer have to say to us now, when our futures depend on a radicalism of consumer novelty? 

A great deal, it would appear, given the evidence of this runway show. Continuing a look from the previous men’s season, the models appear para, sub, or just-post human, with greyed hair frozen askew, the just distressed fabrics those of a Georgian era bohemian after a night under a bridge or a zombie’s debut. There is in this play with the down-and-out nothing new. But in that unique way of a solitary artist of genius, uninflected by the tides of commercial and political pressures, Yamamoto’s doggedly individual vision offers infinitely more hope for a human future than the gestures to sustainability from other fashion houses, which offer a dry collective vision in the service of private profit. 

The inspiration is most evident in the construction of the show itself. The models are the first indication of a radical rethinking (though for artists of Yamamoto’s quality these are always and forever an initial step, an original orientation that never fades. Audiences are simply obliged in the course of the years to catch up to it) of the runway. They represent a remarkable diversity, from the young and beautifully jawed to, in a most successful departure, a series of non-traditionally aged models, these a roll call of influential Japanese film and television stars. Stepping on the runway these actors were met with eager applause.

As they proceeded in their circuit they halted to leer with confusion or unfriendly recognition at the audience before proceeding to a camera at the end of the runway where, staring menacingly into its lens, they offered us at home a similarly intimidating assessment. This interactive element is surprisingly powerful. The actors provide an additional dimension for the show’s message, one necessarily absent from a traditional model’s medium of clothes and make-up. Stopped mid-walk, these swaggering (or swaying) men transform a linear runway route into a global stage, in the process creating a community: of fans, of the suspicious, or the besotted. For what is more tempting than the image of the gangster or dandified thug, represented here in white, Prohibition-era suiting with matching tie? We are reminded of a young adolescent’s first play at dissent by wearing a coat on a summer’s day. Likewise the gangster takes strength from eschewing seasonal dress. Contemporary of course, too, is a series of suits of varying levels of distress and fit, a gesture to past eras of hope and extreme privation: the American Depression; urban blacks photographed in suits during the Great Migration; Southern sharecroppers in sturdy overalls.

Yamamoto’s preoccupation with individual resistance and freedom insists on the importance of self-cultivation and study, on the deep countercultural research of the uncool youth who develops a provisional position before stepping into the world. On the street they are prepared to recognize and embrace others, just as these models, worse-for-wear from some experience, make a connection with the audience, a naked gaze of appeal which no PR department’s set of values could possibly inspire. 

Two weeks ago we received at headquarters the first of a steady trickle of deliveries from an unfamiliar source. DSW: Designer Shoe Warehouse? Familiar to us from unhappy suburban interludes, DSW sells made-for-outlet pieces produced by fading middle class brands long since sold for their logos. Sniffing misappropriation of company funds, we descended the service stairs and entered the intern breakroom cum cleaning closet. “Ooooh. Open one,” stammered a faceless voice, the dim light revealing beneath an old card table two white Gucci sneakers, scuffed, not intentionally in Italy, but from knocking about in our dim corridors, the lateral angle of a worn heel the only distinguishing feature of this nameless creature. “Please, open one.”

We prized open the box and found inside a white soft cloth bag. Spying a few green letters printed on it we supposed the bag to contain a summer sports accessory. In fact, folded as if in surrender in this expedited wooden trunk was the furled white standard of Daniel Lee’s bag and garment covers, introduced during his highly publicised and wildly uneven tenure at Bottega Veneta. Lee’s time at BV revealed his gifts: for interesting and luxurious fabrics, innovative tailoring, and skillfully synthesised street and athletic references applied to shoes and bags. This first DSW shipment revealed a stocky polyester drawstring cylinder wrapped in thick black bands of leather exoskeleton. A typically intelligent combination of material and implied purpose.       

Further deliveries arrived. First, a light blue athletic anorak with exaggerated ripstop cords and heat appliqued zipper channels. Later a matching pair of trousers in nylon gabardine. Both of them interesting tech fabrics, but none implausible as a capsule collection from Lululemon or Rapha. Both shipped from DSW for under $300 USD. A worrying sign, surely. Was this the endgame for Bottega Veneta, or simply a hard departure from Lee’s spell? Less pessimistically, was this simply the orphaned clothes of the long COVID pandemic? Despite all the talk of BV’s revival, was this a sign that they weren’t actually selling all that much? 

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Although Daniel Lee’s gifts were quickly evident, he seemed more comfortable offering them, in a multitude of looks so variable that they could have supplied several sub-labels, than he was demanding anything from BV buyers in return. There was no sense of what Lee might want or expect from his imagined women, or if he had any at all. His Spring ‘22 show for BV revealed a Simonsian degree of obsession with a cultural moment-motown, was it?-but without any clear narrative connection to the clothes themselves. Instead we had white clingy tennis dresses. Too often, as with his withdrawal of the brand from social media, Lee was exacting about irrelevancies. 

Matthieu Blazy’s first show promised, in its degree of continuity or change, perhaps the clearest explanation yet of Lee’s departure. 

Continuities. Blazy has in many ways continued Lee’s shift to a more demotic Bottega Veneta. The show’s opening looks were a women’s cotton tank top and parent jeans followed by a matching men’s look with button-down shirt. Streety and trendy rather than conceptual, the viewer is expected not only to marvel, but also to pay Dior/Hermes prices for these looks because the ironic cotton tops are doubly so: they are made of expertly cut and draped leather. Fortunately, this gambit was, despite being our first taste, not the presiding theme of the show. It was one of several ideas, like a gorgeously tailored oversized boyfriend work shirt cut large in the arms and back, which revealed a crescent, kicked-by-a-horse silhouette. And yet, the neck and bust are gorgeously fitted. Paired with black thigh high leather boots and a pillow bag, it was an unexpectedly sexy look.

Nevertheless, the post-Maier BV era has placed far too much pressure on the surprise fabric. The fabric has so often needed to be a surprise because the look was so conventional, especially given Lee’s, and to a lesser extent Blazy’s, preference for monochrome pieces/looks. Eager to appeal to a less stuffy demographic, Lee swapped the playful colours and patterns of the rich-Dad looks of Tomas Maier for streetwear essentials in rich-Dad materials. The resulting clothes are far too serious. Making streetwear collectible or desirable is so much more work-for designer and pressed to do their research consumer-than a playful or beautifully coloured cashmere top from the Maier era. The old BV tried far less hard. Gimmicks are stressful. It is far more rewarding to dress down or camp up adult fundamentals, where you have a chance at a range of ages, than it is to luxe up undergarments. 

Departures. This debut from Blazy revealed several promising points of departure. Blazy’s woman, so far, is a more historically oriented woman than Lee’s. Where Lee preferred monochromes, flat ‘70s colours and clingy and cropped boucle, his models tended to rely on their bodies and indigenous sex appeal. Kate Moss, not modelling but partying, in a dim ’90s club. Blazy’s women by contrast seem to appreciate the history of dressmaking and clothing. They understand the power of dress to simultaneously attract and conceal. 

A series of lingerie-strapped semi-transparent dresses (looks 61,63,65,68,69) combine a bold sensuality with classic formality. Visible undergarments paired with gestures of feminine formal dress—opera gloves, thigh high leather boots, elaborate print and embellishment—suggest a more productive play with high and low dress codes than Lee could muster. Even if Blazy’s woman could rely solely on her shape, she nevertheless appreciates the transformational, rather than amplifying possibilities of dress. Bruno Sialleli got off to a great start at Lanvin by similarly appealing to the traditions of femininity and dressmaking at his historic fashion house. 

Another welcome change is Blazy’s willingness to combine colour in a single look. The best looks in this show use colourblocking, rather than monochrome, like men’s look 23: a classic Maier era use of colour. Gorgeously cropped purple leather pants paired with a perfect high shine black boot. Blazy should pursue these playful combinations, reminiscent of pre-Lee BV, rather than the latter’s shaggy tailoring, which suggests a single coloured uniform for a firm or operation about which the viewer still is not clear. These combinations of colour also offer a pathway out of the skinny moto pant and thick soled shoe pairing that again offered a hollow futurism: all the bad style without spelling out the utopia. Surely that future isn’t Kanye West, who loved this look, which served his disruptive desire to implode fashion which did not look good on him (all of it). 

An emphasis on tailoring, for both men and women, represents a happy return to the elevated status BV once claimed. The men’s suits are a marvel, particularly a narrower silhouette evident in look 62, composed somehow of larger cut sections which are tidily joined to form a petite, girlish waist. This beautifully androgynous look is shaped as if the suit was preeminently a women’s garment repurposed here rather than the other way round. An excellent look. 

Bottega Veneta after Tomas Maier have had ideas, but they must, in order to keep pace with a marketplace that resembles much of the West in eating its own middle-class, avoid the utterly gratuitous loss of their luxury identity. By making hotted-up colloquial clothes, the brand came in for criticism in some markets for the pricing of its leather goods. Streetwear consumers were queasy bag-buyers. It is far easier and appropriate to make fun with luxury, by making play with print, colour, and cut to surprise the banality of getting and keeping, than it is to disrupt with an eclectic mix of working class images. Often such gimmicks are insulting and subject to cancellation. Blazy, by his commitment to the luxury and glamour of dressmaking with clothes of varying fabric and colour, suggests a much more universal (and international) concept of cosplay, of the idea that feminine clothes ought to inspire transformation and fantasy, to suggest rather than simply reveal the human body.    

Dries van Noten’s men’s Fall/Winter ‘23 campaign is a study of liminality. The “Video Fashion Show” which accompanies the collection presents a number of youths in a decaying high-ceilinged house with distressed, on-label wallpapers. In that conscious blend of formal and leisure wear that has characterised recent seasons, these boys (and from the look of it, girls) appear to be exploring a spooky abandoned house, rifling old wardrobes. Or perhaps a formal event has just concluded. We have pointy patent leather derby shoes, sequined pants and neck scarves; the younger guests having swapped into a comfortable garment to wind down. 

The video opens and concludes with a couple kissing; elsewhere a young man in a quiet reverie is roused, happily or not we aren’t sure, by the touch of a man standing behind him. Was he unaware of the latter’s presence? Or surprised at the gesture? The lyrics to the film’s music come to our aid. “Dream, baby dream…” These hazy images of fantasy—a kiss? These days?!—representing so many of the imagined intimacies of the Age of Lockdown. It has taken a global health pandemic to produce an antidote to our modern pop media-as-softcore-pornography. An uncontextualized kiss today is profoundly kinky. But was it real? Or a dream? 

There is uncertainty in the show’s gender play, too, a talking point about which Dries van Noten hardly needs to flash a credential. It is a men’s show with several female models, a more literal, spelled out (in this way very contemporary) variety of his traditional, and for us preferred, approach to androgyny: embedding it in the clothes. In this collection the tailoring is flared, with waistcoat-tight jackets and exaggerated—both width and length—trousers. The shoulders of the more interesting fitted jackets are squared-off, the sleeves cut to a princess/mutton shape. It’s an unlikely, and entirely successful, combination. The androgyny is self-evident, which is why we found it surprising that two suchs suits were modelled by women. The tension, it seems to us, is better displayed by a model with pretensions to masculinity. The risk here is that a woman in women’s directional (slim top to flared bottom) tailoring looks like a woman modelling women’s clothing. 

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The collection’s lookbook contains 73 images. That’s a lot, and there’s a great diversity, too. In fact, it’s difficult to see in this season a unifying thread, a narrative that could, in the manner of past shows, supply a title for it: Paris; Gypsies; Sports, etc. This is no bad thing. It is, on the contrary, a bold reaction, and a statement. We saw this departure in the last men’s collection , an Antwerp-themed grab-bag of the label’s past work and a critique of the fashion industry’s cash-driven obsession with classification and categorization. We mean the logo. The variety in that archival show, continued here, arrested a concerning trend among recent Dries seasons (spring shows in particular), focused as they were on a named contemporary artist, whose work supplied a close template for variations of colour. These looks were often pretty and increasingly popular. But: people on the street began to name check the designer of our clothes. Indeed, recognizable Dries patterns were becoming their own kind of logo. In our current branding moment, of, for example, the CELINE logo (and don’t be fooled, LVMH didn’t hire Hedi Slimane because of his unwillingness to go there), the diversity of these last two Dries shows represents a welcome refusal to be so easily marked. 

We are happy to return to the old modesty, regardless of the eye-catching nature of the garment itself, of Dries van Noten. Either too handsomely tailored, too club-wild, or too exotically embroidered, surely, to be Dries van Noten, there is an elusiveness among the collected work, undergirded by a sober mastery of texture and fabric, an elusiveness to billboard-style classification that bewitches both observer and wearer. We are reminded of the inventory at Modern Appealing Clothing (MAC), a longtime San Francisco stockist of the label. Against the far wall of the store, hidden behind the eye-catching season’s items, rested a series of dark winter suits. In dark blue and maroon wool, a few with modest Oriental-inflected patterns, all with uniquely small designer labels inside, they represented the noble foundation for the freakier items we steadfastly collect from Dries. The flashier pieces in a Dries collections like an “it” boy with a title.  

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Although the emphasis is on variety, we can nevertheless trace continuities from recent seasons. The leather footwear is the industry’s best and most innovative. Bulging blister leather shapes from last Fall are supplemented here by a new medical overshoe that will test concerns of “wearability.” We believe we notice a second slightly less swollen and wrinkled variation, however, that is just right. Wider pants are evident not only in suits: casual pants in nylon satin and black cotton/wool, are big, too, some with Juicy Couture velvet and cargo pocket, each with artful interpretations of the elasticated waistband. Who knew that could be made sexy? The dark leisure pants look like Yohji Yamamoto. 

Wants: this season’s suiting produces an uncomplicated lust rivalled only by Alessandro Michele at Gucci. Yes, the suits, and today that is not an easy thing to pull off. Just as the menswear newcomer dips his toe into fashion with a designer sneaker—”I don’t know what else I’ll be doing, but by God, these shoes will look fresh”—these suits are an invitation not to fear (how do I pull off a suit?), but to suiting’s first principles: come what may, this look will carry me through. A beautiful armor. The genius in these suits is the avoidance of the costuming effect of Michele’s retro nostalgia. Rather than referencing a look from a compromised past, these suits are a conscientious mash-up of lines, suggesting a pleasurably uncertain future. 

Frederic Tcheng’s Dior and I (2014), on Raf Simons’ first ready-to-wear collection for the fabled couture house, offers a revealing insight into the working methods of one of the industry’s most likeable designers. Quiet if not introverted, Simons must add to the perennial challenges of renewed inspiration and tight deadlines a series of additional difficulties: turning out a compelling debut show after his recent appointment; establishing trust among Dior staff after the departure of incumbent John Galliano’s 15 years at the house; and, more practically, getting work done. Simons’ French is poor.

We feel the tension in the Dior offices as Simons develops his idea for the season. His process is a stubborn, solo endeavour, his concepts like the secreted passion of an adolescent. Simons returns inflamed, almost jittery, from a Parisian gallery. A contemporary non-figurative artwork has struck him, Dior staff are excitedly informed. They nod encouragingly. Surely, the palette and theme will provide an excellent foundation for them to do their work. To their bemusement, and much shifting of feet, Simons is having none of it. Could we reproduce it in facsimile on a giant printer? A typical piece of Simons’ self-effacing charm: utter confidence in his ability to spot genius, without assuming any of his own, or anyone else’s. How, he seems to ask Dior’s collective of the very best artists, embroiderers, and dressmakers, could we approach anything like the brilliance of this artwork? How indeed, the staff grumble.       

To share his inspirations would be to distort them, subject them to dilution or wounding ridicule. Simons’ men’s looks, especially for his namesake label, are in this way so many collages, the application, unchanged, of photographs and images, like a teenager’s pegboard above the bed, that site of dreams and unrealised promise. In this way, by applying his inspirations—photographs, album covers, text resembling signage—virtually unchanged, Simons seems to embrace those of us who cannot always obtain the runway pieces we desire. By applying his seasonal inspirations unaltered, they remain unconsummated, not subject to the sloppy adult detumescence of having been there and done it. A Peter Pan effect that we might consider clever if it weren’t so obviously the kernel of Simons’ character.       

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A futuristic spacecraft mezzanine preceding the models’ runway circuit gave us pause. Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Goldblum bookended the show, suggesting a fin-de-siecle sci-fi noir storyline. Simons’ strict inspirational rubrics always threaten to oversaturate a collection: if the viewer isn’t into (anymore) a particular reference, there’s very little to do. And this is where the partnership with Prada has greatly benefitted his collections. His stubbornness—brilliance does not exist in its absence—is still evident, but is leavened by some of the excellent prints and artwork that Prada produced in the seasons preceding his arrival. The only nerdy monotony in this show was the insistent Numan/Bowiesque vocals. 

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Raf Simons menswear rates poorly on our proprietary wearability scale. Remember, user results will vary, but from where we write, modern Sparta, Simons’ most dependable code, the oversized jacket, is a tricky proposition. We find that in the field an outrageously feathered and/or coloured number with swiss cheese holes will generate less of a fuss than Simons’ more subtle play on the suit. The former can on the American coasts be diffidently ignored; in the South the subject of shameless glares. But a not-quite-conformist suit produces outright hostility among the American bourgeoisie, an unforgivable send-up of conservative proprieties. As a statement and concept they work—they’re quite skillfully tailored with a power-curve shoulder and almost modular join to an oversized sleeve. But the narrow lapel is the tell: this is play. Intelligent, trenchant, but not exactly pretty. 

There is plenty of this tailoring here, which serves as the traditional outer shell for Simons’ blushing preference for colour, a method queer boys from the sticks will recognize from their first adventurous accessories, those wrongly coloured gloves, hat, scarf, whichever of the least costly designer items made up the first items of a collection. Of a life. Baselayers since SARS-Covid have been the site of Simons’ colour, peeking from wrists, neck, and leggings. Easter egg shades in satinized nylon—a fabric of the moment—shirts and pants in this show bring some of this colour closer to the surface, and skillfully too: we find, in our era of off-and-on lockdowns, that for a quick takeout food retrieval the kind of synthetic ski pants offered here, capable of standing up to repeated wears, are just the thing.

And yet the feeling has persisted, our hopes raised, that the partnership with Prada would at its best see Simons challenged to move beyond this restriction of colour, from necks (a key site of this show) and wrists to full ensembles of colour; to, as it were, turn the Raf Simons look inside out. And, indeed, we have that here, with mixed results. A series of sci-fi inflected shirt and elasticated waist uniforms in monochrome pastels, from a 20th century space mission or nuclear reactor are well cut, paired with leather shoes. The leather versions offer a smart texture contrast but will be skipped due to the preference of a certain talent-free celebrity for this kind of thing. A dark purple one-piece jumpsuit with intelligent conventional button fastening is that rarest of things: a men’s jumpsuit with high want factor. The tailoring is exceptional; the collar gorgeous. All this colour is welcome, the uniforms striking a slyly appropriate note of caution for recent utopian projects. How many of us now clinch at a friend’s reference to a podcast/program with all the answers!? 

The concluding model Jeff Goldblum brilliantly teases at these complications of sci-fi futurism. In an ankle-length coat with cat-shaved-from-surgery fur patches Goldblum approaches the runway with arms swinging and the decisiveness of long-held authority. Yet a closer look shows his eyes attempting first to focus, then occasionally peering about him, in one instance nearly stopping, as if at an apparition, of an acquaintance perhaps, but whose ghostlike state oughtn’t be investigated, either from fear or a sense of duty to fashion. He is propelled forward. At the conclusion of his circuit Goldblum looks briefly at the lights above him, as if finally taking the measure of his surroundings. A mad aging sovereign. Or a robot? 

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Wants: hungry for contrasting colour and prints, we will collect the lovely dog-collars in the now-traditional Prada prints and the related turtlenecks with print accents. We plan to skip most of the tailoring since, the jackets being cut to a certain frontal bulk for Simons’ preferred coloured baselayer contrast, the jackets in effect are made as coats. So why not go for a proper coat instead? We have in mind the spectacular coloured leather trenchcoats, perhaps the best and most natural fusion of Simons and Prada yet, combining the ash and dark coloured leather of recent Prada coats, but with Simons’ unmistakably contemporary cut, the leather here creating a slightly pinched effect, harmonizing shoulder, chest and arm.

Raf Simons’ work rarely brings “sexy” to mind. Archives, the inspiration and practical effect of his pieces, rarely are. Archives are those jealously guarded dreams stuffed under the bed, shyly debuted for our first trusted avant garde friend. A good friend will send this treasure scattering across the bedroom. “Come, let’s go out.” It shouldn’t be surprising then, that the best suit from a show full of them was not on the runway, despite the often charming contrasts of colour and fabric. The best of the lot was on Simons himself. Flowing, utterly unaffected trousers and just-right signature jacket. That was sexy. Get that one.