Fashion Review
Feeling Boyish, in Shorts or a Suit
By
CATHY HORYN
PARIS
NOW that men are more in touch with their feminine sides, the rest of us feel free, if not compelled, to snigger at them. The French spring men's shows, which ended Tuesday, served up athletic shirts and shorts, but a few determined designers showed pearls and eye-catching lace. It was like watching a soccer ball bounce off Byron's head.
Ann Demeulemeester's slithery lace and eyelet shirts may have been Byron as conceivably worn by
Mick Jagger, who, with the
Rolling Stones, resumes his latest world tour in Milan next week. Ms. Demeulemeester's fine collection, with its emphasis on a kind of dandy-rock tailoring ("Has she been in Tokyo lately?" an editor said midshow), caught a dressy mood lurking behind the sports mania.
Similarly,
Marc Jacobs's polished collection of hibiscus-print trousers, piqué jackets and silvery brogues for Louis Vuitton displayed an understanding of the feral heart of the LV consumer.
But even as we know that the Louis script brooches will land on the breasts of Toyko fashion freaks, even as we know that Bernhard Willhelm's cotton culotte housedresses in Bavarian cottage prints were just meant to be fun and contentious, we can't help feeling, as they say in fashion, a little Over It.
Men's wear used to be about efficiency and comfort. That, at any rate, was the ideal. But fashion has succeeded in building a McMansion for itself, with clothes that are at once grand and ridiculous. To look at Yohji Yamamoto's loose "Godfather" trousers with suspenders threaded through slits in the coat is to imagine a Three Stooges moment as the man unsnarls himself for a bathroom break.
Well, you have to laugh. Instead of giving a man a look that squares with the efficiency of his iPod and BlackBerry, that does credit to his body, designers have made him an object of our ridicule, a fussy britches.
The exception is Raf Simons. He manages to hold our interest, in part because it is obvious that he has given a lot of thought to what he wants to show (and not show) and in part because each collection is a chapter in a narrative that began modestly more than 10 years ago in Antwerp, his home. Modesty is central to his fashion as well as his character. I can't think of a better definition of masculinity.
With this collection, Mr. Simons has drawn a clear aesthetic separation between his own label and Jil Sander, where he is in his second season.
As a backdrop for his show, Mr. Simons ran a film by the artist Mark Leckey depicting teenagers at raves. At the start of his career, Mr. Simons used movies he made with friends to convey youth's energy and obsessions. So the Leckey film served as a visual signpost for a designer whose mind has always been trained on a single subject.
For the last couple of years, Mr. Simons has also pushed himself, in a way that perhaps only Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga has, to ask how fashion can believably suggest the future, and the clue this season was the show's invitation, which listed, telephone book-style, the names of all the individuals who have gone into space.
He then took these two straightforward, if conflicting, impulses — romantic evergreen youth and futurist technology — and combined them, crossing divides of tailoring and construction, while leaving an impression of a single silhouette or line. Slim black suits in a crinkly blend of nylon and metal were standout, the tailoring sharp and up to date.
There were terrific shorts, slim and charcoal-plain as well as full in bias-cut pinstripes with curving insets of a mesh fabric near the pockets. The full versions, shown with long-sleeved ribbed tops and Teva-style black sandals, made you think of the bony legs of a boy standing in his swimming trunks at the end of a dock.
Mr. Simons has a gift for abstracting ideas — from music, art — and making the results seem not merely new but also concrete. Junya Watanabe also picked up on the athletic theme, and his collection of tailored suits in sports fabrics was exceptional. But in a way the results were still too literal.
Mr. Simons, by contrast, breaks down the original idea to give us something wholly new. This was apparent in the boxy, blossoming shorts now in classic men's fabrics, in elegant parachute-inspired coats, and in sleeveless T-shirts with striped insets of color. Their starting point could have been a soccer jersey or an
Ellsworth Kelly canvas — who can tell?
For as many years as Hedi Slimane has been the men's designer at Dior — and the company's chief executive Sidney Toledano said Tuesday night that contract renewal talks with Mr. Slimane have stalled — he should have evolved beyond twig-thin adolescents in jeans sliding off their backsides. If it were possible to find more girlish models (with ironed Dutch-boy haircuts), it's hard to think where. Hey, at the couture shows, which began Wednesday!
Mr. Slimane seemed intent on making a statement about the skinny silhouette, as though it were his final word. The collection had some strong pieces, including tunics in skimmy jersey and taut safari jackets in khaki cotton and black leather. But it betrayed an incapacity to be open to change, which is fatal in fashion.
THOUGH sports clothes have been a dominant story of the spring 2007 men's wear season, a casual-classy elegance remains important. Normally a purveyor of pattern and color, Dries van Noten opened his collection with a subtle blend of graphite, cream and black, enlivened with sleek white patent leather. He made charcoal sweat pants look tailored and fresh, with white shirts and belted coats. Gradually he introduced color, beginning with a boyish pair of lilac shorts.
Stefano Pilati has a great sense of color that has served him well at Yves Saint Laurent. In the main, this collection was lighter and more offhand than last season, with desirable blazers in robin's-egg linen and slim Prince of Wales pants. It would be nice to see more eccentric gestures like high-top suede moccasins, and while tunic shirts may not fly (shades of your friendly dentist), Mr. Pilati is right to push things a bit. His trouble has been proportion and fussy layering. Now that he appears to be fixing that, he might consider a more contemporary site than a gilded ballroom. The trick is to wear Saint Laurent's mantle lightly.
A sense of play infused a good Comme des Garçons collection, with designer Rei Kawakubo dipping nearly everything — from graffiti-print coats to the reflective visors of caps — in gold. Rough linen tweeds were flecked in gold, as Ms. Kawakubo seemed to be acknowledging, perversely, youth's privilege.
A Frankenstein theme allowed
John Galliano to blow up some fireworks, but the glossy black suits were actually cool and wearable. He kept things raw, in his fashion, with flounced T-shirts and itty-bitty swim pants. Alber Elbaz's second men's show for Lanvin was boyish and fresh, with the focus on light-colored slim suits in washed cotton with (sockless) patent-leather loafers.
Martin Margiela's collection was based loosely on San Francisco in the 1970's, with jivey suits, the odd varsity cardigan and bong-shop details like rings molded from house keys. Nothing terribly exciting, but nothing to snigger at, either.
