Tag: Fall2021Fashion

Crotchety in Westwood at Westwood

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We strolled last week down Memory Lane. Not, to be sure, our own, but that of a visiting out-of-town friend, who worked in film in 1990s Los Angeles. Our template was Melrose Avenue, where we walked a reasonable length, (a contradiction: to ambulate in southern California beyond the mailbox is to be instantly declasse) from La Cienega east to Wasteland, a second-hand store we understand is largely unchanged from our friend’s prowling years ago. We noticed high prices, above end-of-season sale rates, for much-worn pieces. We noticed our age, too. The music was far too loud and the light too low. Girls wandered through the gloom in states of semi-dress, trying items on in mirrors fixed to architectural columns. Only as they departed, so meagerly clothed, did the intelligence of their efficient changing-room outfits become clear.    

The city’s retail transformations might, paradoxically, be more evident to recent and infrequent visitors to Los Angeles, like us here at Gyun Gyun. There are on Melrose and elsewhere long stretches of high-rent spaces empty, creating segregated and no-go spaces within the famously patchwork neighbourhoods of the city. The dialectic effect is of a hyper segregation of geography at the same time that, as we have remarked elsewhere in these pages, a much greater diversity of Americans are bravely patronising neighbourhoods historically closed—except as staff—to them.        

Our friend came of age and self with Vivienne Westwood, whose tall, light-stone store looms incommensurably on a corner lot arm’s-length from the self-consciously luxurious stores of Melrose Place. With its VIP space upstairs and rooftop garden, the store evokes a mistaken urbanity, of a Parisian atelier placed clumsily like a monument on the Washington Mall. 

We have had over the years similarly bewildering in-store experiences. Where other sellers of rebellious, liberating, and identity-transforming clothes have tended to be welcoming and encouraging (when not grooming), the Westwood staff have always been impressively cold and standoffish, with a remarkable, almost trained, consistency. Maybe it’s a “punk” thing?        

On one such occasion, we mistook such negligence for tasteful discretion, only to look up from a rack of clothes terminating behind the counter, where staff were idly scrolling the Huffington Post homepage. As we exited the store we loudly praised the Westwood/The Rug Company rug near the street entrance. Finally sure of an audience, we slowly dug our toe into its surface. “I have the bigger version.”   

This visit the staff were much more lively, showing consideration and efficiency to walk-in shoppers while they operated at much-reduced capacity, though not without that familiar suggestion of effortful patience. The clothes don’t quite work for us here at GG-like Punk music an artistic dead-end, at their best an Edwardian style and texture put to better, more progressive use by Burton at McQueen. Neither did the prices suit our guest. We each took home a neatly coloured pub/football towel at what we thought a fair 75 USD. One can never have too many towels near the beach. 

Before entering the store, we made a small queue with a young couple arrived shortly after us. The man, unusually tall and thin, wore a black, logoed, ironic-synthetic athletic warm-up suit. The sun was out and it was warm. He campily puffed a heavily flavoured cheroot, bringing to mind a clammy Jimmy Savile. His partner was heavily made-up, with a gyroscope eye which, though her head was invariably turned away, would at intervals fix on us a level stare.

“Who makes that bag? Lanvin?”

“You have a good…eye. Wow. Yes, it is.”

He nodded and half-turned his head to exhale. A mock-propriety amidst virus-shy regulations. 

“How much was that?”

We alternate between policies of inquiry and disclosure on cost. For a time we thought it a cutely anti-bourgeois line of conversation. On reflection it seems a dubious way to start a revolution. To his direct question we thought the only move a straightforward reply.

“21. Or 25?”

We cringed at our own abbreviation. Surely that is only on when there are at least two more zeroes in play.

He nodded. 

“Seen the new collaboration with Gallery Dept.?”

“In fact, I just read the email this morning…”

“Those are going to be rare. Expensive.”

“Oh?” Doubt concealed with quick agreement. “I’m sure. They looked interesting.”

“They’ll be hot.”

He nodded confidently.

Such genuity regarding fashion betrayed the man as an avid consumer rather than insider. And who, apart from fans of older Lanvin womenswear (we’re sure we’re the only ones who half-heartedly collected the old men’s) would spot their latest bags? Both a Paul Smith and a Loewe employee misidentified ours as Loewe since we started wearing it. We were impressed by this young man’s research.

The exchange raised questions for us on the future of legacy fashion houses. Here was embodied proof of the excitement of the drop/dump/collaboration. Hype for its own sake; utterly false rumour of limited quantities; truly dubious artistic merit. And yet, clearly this young man was a serious shopper: the future. What then, does that future look like for the big houses? Should they remove the fixed designer entirely, rotating as they do now between teams, like relief pitchers or football goalkeepers, and set up shop as so many art galleries, lending their logos to a changing cast of influencers, who will dump/drop/collab a remix on the hype-hungry?  

Bag Bumming

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My new daily driver is Lanvin’s “Hook” Bag. It is large and structured, so that I can load it with all the necessaries of a full day out, yet also flexible enough for a tight space; between people or car seats. It is also thrillingly unisex, with a sturdy, comfortable strap that can produce purse, tote, and even backpack effects. Adjusting it is a pleasure, since it fastens with a tasteful loop stamped with the Lanvin text logo. The hardware has discreet house logos, too, and the eagle-eyed (a rep at the local Loewe store not among them; she thought it was one of their own) will note the “JL” stitching of the strap. 

The bag is elegant and luxurious, but not too “cutely” shaped. It serves very well on days we haven’t the strength to trade in “well, men’s bags aren’t pretty-deal with it!” defiance.

On receipt of it from Lanvin’s K11 Musea Hong Kong store, I didn’t think of reviewing or filming it. I just wanted to cram our things in it and use it. That process was a relief, too, as I transferred my cards to the attached wallet. For years now I’ve used a Valentino rockstud fold wallet. A pleasure to use and pretty, the studs nevertheless required careful attention to avoid scratching other leather accessories in a shared tote. The (permanent?) retirement of the Valentino and the personal revelation of the attached wallet-how many discarded bags have misshapen, abused, royal like the currency they nobly carried, these little flags separated from their bodies, waving in surrender?-gave me a delightfully carefree feeling. 

Perhaps too carefree. After a midweek lunch I stepped into a local Whole Foods grocery store for a single item: peanut butter for post-exercise smoothies. 

Whole Foods stores in this area resemble nothing so much as a singles bar. Shopping expensively, in their sexiest athleisure wear, the no-longer-quite youth here describe the very kernel of their souls by the food they (don’t) eat. There has always in this location been bouncers, too. They have since it opened nearly a decade ago had a preoccupation with imagined theft (of what?), and employ patrolling security at all hours.

So it was, dressed thus

that we entered for a precision grab of organic peanut butter. I picked from the shelf the nearest container and brought it to my chest before, superstitiously, remembering to replace it for an “untouched” container at the back of the shelf, no matter that I already handled the “dirtier” one. 

Quarry in hand I made for the checkout. But first, I made to extract the attached wallet from the Hook bag. Pulling on the leather strap it was rapidly reeled to the surface. My hands though, were still damp with hand sanitizer from entering the store. Concerned, unnecessarily, with the leather finish, I attempted to unzip the wallet while exposing it to the minimum surface area of hands and fingers.

Although I have long since lost any shame at the public display of “women’s bags,” I also feel no need to advertise this little gender rebellion in a “conservative” (that is to say, anti-cosmopolitan) locale. I half-turned for privacy, still by the peanut butter, to learn the best use of the wallet, struggling in a pinched chicken wing posture, sawing ineffectually at the string zipper.
Card in hand I waited in line behind a family of three, the father, trim and outdoorsy, negotiating with his daughter, whose head reached just below the terminal, about who should conduct their card transaction. 
“I can!”
“You will-one second.”
The father inserted the card, rather unsportingly I thought, while the girl stood with furrowed brow, her two hands poised around it. 
“Okay, take it.”

I gave a “wasn’t that nice” smile to the checker, a woman in her 30s. In my left hand the peanut butter; in right, shouldered bag and credit card. 

As I extended my arm to hand her the peanut butter she asked, “Is that all?”
“Yep,” I said, automatically, in the way a parent might affirm a newly speaking child’s identification of a passing object. 
“Is that all?” she said again, this time with a low tone to the final word.
“Yeah,” I said, with an apologetic chuckle, unsure whether she hadn’t heard us, or if she thought a single item unusual.
“Is that all?” she said, this time taking time over each word. 
“Oh. You think I’m shoplifting?!”
“I don’t know what you’re doing.”

I immediately understood why I was being accused-it was the fussing with the bag and the peanut butter swap. Nevertheless an unedifying scene followed.

*

Of the hand-wringing threats to the fashion industry-sustainability, diversity, retail/resale-the least threatening to us is the big resale websites. What is the benefit, when a live-feed of a purchase broadcasts our individual credibility, of buying a used bag at 80% of retail on the TheRealReal? Overproduction and year-round sales from all but a couple of the conglomerate labels mean it is possible to buy these items new for less than on consignment, where the buyer has to pay for two sellers. 

TheRealReal is useful as a well photographed archive, however. Searching for the proper name for our Lanvin Hook bag, a used version was advertised to us by Google. TheRealReal called it a “leather Hobo bag” (1125.00 USD). 

After our experience trying to buy peanut butter with it, we thought this an accurate description.

Or: was it to do with that double waisted Prada trouser? Does the sight of it anger people? You be the judge:

Lanvin Fall Winter 2021 First Look

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A nostalgic music video introduced Lanvin’s FW 21 collection this morning. It is a cheering piece, offering an unconventional look, de rigueur no thanks to the pandemic, of the variety of ways fashion designers can play with the inspirations for their collections.  

Bruno Sialelli’s first menswear collections didn’t impress us. They looked a lot like Loewe, his previous gig. The clothes had the by-now definitive sailor-prep look of Loewe menswear: light sand and sky colours, white at collar or cuff and hardly anything, apart from long wool nautical coats, that could be worn to a restaurant that takes credit cards. It was a worrying suggestion of limited range that both the 2020 shows were beach themed.      

But there were promising elements, too. Sialelli is strong with prints and patterns, making use of both to emphasise, not a single logo, per corporate requirements, but a great many, including the very old and beautiful mother/daughter signature of the house, used as an all-over print, and also collection-specific artistic rendering of text, the house name emblazoned on top and trousers like a holiday advertising hoarding. 

We at gyungyun like from our designers coherence and specificity above all. We want to feel that we are enjoying the fruits of an artist’s obsessive labour of love, not a moonshot at a logo or influencer that will save the bottom line. And thankfully Sialelli is showing some of that, too. His menswear, particularly from the waist down, shows a keen eye, an almost obsessive understanding of an epoch; in this case late 1990s alternative sportswear.

If that embedded cult anthropologist of American youth Hedi Slimane produced collections inspired by the eternal return of the coastal surf boy, Sialelli is inspired by the slightly more athletic American skateboarder. For even when Slimane appears to be showing skateboarders (SS21 Celine) he still cannot let go of the Vans wearing surfer. 

Sialelli’s references to the skater-athlete are much sharper. His cropped pants, a carry-over from Loewe, paired with the successful Bumpr sneaker, are a gesture to the summertime saturation of major American sportswear brands during the late Clinton years. Starting in Fall ‘20 Sialelli began exploring some of the fringes of the 1990s norm, with exaggerated width trousers, belted a little too low, and fat tongued, short-bodied skateboard sneakers, reminiscent of a pair by DC or Etnies. If Slimane looks, perhaps in vain, for the grotesque beauty of the affluent coast, Sialelli seems to understand the less-fashionable, but no less loved, transformations of the high-corporate as worn in the suburbs. These, one imagines, are the looks of the demigods of the designer’s youth, the beloved teenagers of his own childhood: friends of older siblings, no longer playing sports but still hiding an unmistakably athletic body beneath saggy pants; a DJ when they were provincial, talented, and cool. 

It is no surprise, then, to see a similarly accurate historical approach to the music video introducing the new collection. To the happy surprise of those of us who feel uneasy at the marriage of (too) casual wear and fashion, we learned that the future is formal, and that dinosaurs like us will show the youth the way.

The film is in fact a music video, set to (in its most recent adaptation) Gwen Stefani’s If I Was a Rich Girl. An international group of young people disembark from an old Lincoln limousine and check into the Shangri-La Paris. In a measured reference to the limitations of our current social lives, the kids arrive in formal wear and, apparently restricted to their accommodations, make the best of a rough job, tearing through rooms littered with Lanvin branded shopping bags in sexy, luxe fabric dresses and animal print casual wear. 

The film is a delightful send-up of the 1990s hip-hop music video, a suggestion that the app idols aren’t as revolutionary as they imagine. There is the same self-referentiality, of riches and wealth and goodies unavailable for use; the clothes so much rapper money, unspent, probably unreal, thrown sterile at the camera. Like an old episode of MTV Cribs, these glamorous residents trot out their luxury car collection, too. But they are children’s electric toy cars, on top of which models in low-cut dresses and opera gloves do donuts in the hotel ballroom . These aren’t the slightly cringeworthy diversions of lonely popstars, after all. They are the waking dreams of a generation of youth who want to be able to live theirs. “If I Was a Rich Girl,” I would give it all away to live, this film seems to say. 

And accurately, too. It’s pitch perfect in places. Who recalls the flimsy storylines of music videos during their peak? One was either, and rarely both, a viewer of the dancing in the video, or of the slightly vague love story narrative, an attempt no doubt, at cross-branding, which is here, too. Inevitably our hero/performer would be met by the character from a contemporary film or show, often minor, and we have that here, in a dancing concierge. An influencer, surely? 

The clothes? Hard to say without a lookbook. The best luxury designers today sell menswear in two categories: the ever more youthful streetwear—here leopard print tracksuit, those baggy pants and skate shoes—and tailoring with varying degrees of reference to the first category. The streetwear depends for sales on hype (and therefore of limited artistic or critical utility); the second, on designer talent. 

Sialelli’s men’s tailoring is uniquely androgynous. It is soft, monochrome, and gently oversized, with narrow piped sleeves. It is reminiscent, in the pastel colours and frequent recourse to a double-breast, to women’s postwar day suits. The jackets reference the 50s and 60s in colour and material, in contrast to Gucci’s 70s high-camp fabrics and the earnest masculinity of Kim Jones’s athletic (‘80s?) Dior runway suits. If “cool French girl” could be found in men’s suits, we might find it at Sialelli’s Lanvin.                       

Midway through the video, a giggly girls’ bathroom moment is interrupted by a video call with Eve. Also celebrating in anxious isolation, in black dress and clutching a black pencil bag with gorgeous oversized hardware, Eve delivers a few lines of verse, as if to affirm and kickstart the value of youthful desire. It’s a lovely intergenerational touch, speaking a too-often obscured message of these times, of hopeful (for once) universals, and of promise born from diversity.   

Dries Van Noten Men Fall 2021

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Dries Van Noten’s digital Autumn/Winter 2021-2022 menswear show is, like the past twelve months, a little bit stressful. A fixed camera trained on a patch of sky at dawn. We are looking up, past wide steps, at a grand stone entrance, a frame from which models materialize, from dawn to dusk, to take a couple of steps down to the viewer, before disappearing again. Where are we? The stone of the building seems institutional, grand, noble. But why have we been deprived of context? Are we inside that kind of institution? The anxiety swells as daylight appears, then fades, until finally the label’s beautiful evening wear heralds the close of the day. It is an all too familiar feeling of confinement. 

A significant proportion of the collection reckons with the familiar compromises of this confinement. To its credit, Dries does not attempt the contrived undergarment positivity present in other menswear collections this season (see Fendi; Prada). Even so, some will view the blended work/casual pieces with the weary recognition of familiar asylum uniforms. We have here boyfriend sweatshirts, office shirts stretched to dress length (the Zoom surprise), oversized friar’s hoodies and loafers in a swollen leather that gives them the look of downmarket Christmas gifts.      

It is perhaps telling, however, that the most groomish look, an oversized knitwear cardigan and matching shorts, is complemented by one of the fixtures of the collection, mid-calf length knit socks. The effect is of a cut or (rather sexily) exploded trouser, a casual at-home fixture destroyed in a peal of rage or inspiration. 

Because this is a hopeful show, too. The instrumental soundtrack—overlapping sounds of a clock, metronome, and the desperate banging of a captive—by Belgians Thierry de Mey and Peter Vermeersch is entitled “Eerste Beweging:” first movement (new beginning?). Against darkened skies the models appear before the viewer in shadow, almost as Platonic forms, creatures who still move in the outside world, who see truth. Divine Uber delivery-drivers? We will emerge one day, this show seems to say. And when we do, we have work to do, a world to fix. And we’ll do it in beautiful tailoring. 

gyungyun’s take: 

Dries fans will snap up the dressier jackets and trousers—cinctured beautifully by a smart chain and circle buckle belt—in the familiar varsity colours of his AW collections, but in much wider cut and higher waist than last year. These are contrasted in the collection with a gorgeous cropped trouser, styled brilliantly with oversized tops and coats. The leather version is a must buy. 

The miserly Uncle in us is tantalized by the fabric per dollar proposition of the generously cut denim in this collection, as well as the utility of pairing with chunkier jackets. Their flowing, straight tailoring provides the additional benefit of moving beyond the ‘90s ( industry) or ‘70s (Gucci) silhouettes. A buy.

Dries collectors will snap up the lovely zodiac embroidered jackets, no matter their inexplicable presence in this show. The turtlenecks, of lovely print and pattern oughtn’t be seen solely as a gesture to at-home wear. Diehards will recognize them as a fundamental part of his explorations of layering and draping. See for example, AW 16-17. Old boys will also have their eye on the black leather/rubber hybrids, in both boot and lace-up versions, both buys, and a mainstay of the gyungyun wardrobe labyrinth since the mid 2000s. 

The leather loafers, a big part of the collection, were initially rated a pass. Jonathan Anderson has been doing versions of these the last couple years. On closer examination, they are, as ever, intelligent and desirable. Skip the rubber soled version and buy the elegant leather split sole, with a practical elasticated ankle and cool chunky heel tab. We would still pass on the pillow bags, however, which are currently in favour at Lanvin and Bottega Veneta. The mixed leather finish backpack and tote, reminiscent of the “giant pocket” trench from Lagerfeld’s SS19 Fendi (womenswear) show, are the outstanding accessories.  

Gyungyun tends to wait until sales on the casual art-inspired print pieces. Unfortunately, these tend to be copied quickly and quite explicitly by other labels, in some cases the inspiration for whole labels, and are heavily inventoried by Western online merchants who have picked up and popularised Dries in the last few years. This comes at the expense of the suiting, which rarely translates well to third party merchant models and styling. A shame, since there is no better value casual suiting for originality, fabric, and price in ready to wear. 

Dries is the anti-”drop” (“dump” as our house style manual would have it) label. It is only by handling in-person the fabric, construction, and more discreet prints from Dries that one can appreciate the house’s profound singularity, its emphasis on merit beyond the algorithmic winners of a phone screen, and, by extension, the achievements of this season. Here’s hoping for an in-person examination.