BEAUTY: Clothing--Homme Plissé Issey Miyake

Pitti Uomo wrapped up yesterday and this year's guest designers included Homme Plissé Issey Miyake. It sounds like the show was a visual treat. I will let fashion journalist Luke Leitch of Vogue tell you better than I can:

"As the onset of dusk began to lower the temperature just a little in Pitti last night, the Issey Miyake sub-brand Homme Plissé took its first step on what promises to be a peripatetic voyage of inspiration.

Founded by the late Issey Miyake in 2013, the brand began showing on the Paris menswear calendar in 2019. In January this year, however, Plissé’s place in the Parisian sun was handed to the newer Miyake sub-brand (of which there seem to be many), IM Men. Which is why the Homme Plissé team touched down in Florence. Going forward, the brand will adopt a nomadic schedule of self-presentation, rambling here and there to connect with local markets and explore new forms of self-expression as it sees fit.

This collection was shown in the garden of the Villa Medicea della Petraia, a fine old house in the hills outside of the city. Before it started visitors were treated to an exhibition in the building’s covered courtyard that contextualized the collection as the result of a team research trip around Italy. The color of lemons and tomatoes, the process of painting, and the art of traveling light were all alluded to, first in the display and then second on the runway.

The mixed paint facemasks, paintbrush pockets, and outerwear pieces with integrated coathangers were all whimsical allusions back to that research process. So too were the abundant juicy shades in which some of these typically fluid Homme Plissé pieces were presented. Shown on the gravel paths of the villa’s ornamental garden, the show saw the models crunch a route way between islands of sun-parched lawn. Serendipitously, a system of sprinklers opened up mid-way into the show: this trick generated refracted rainbows in the summer air. Along the way, there seemed to be a few Medici-related renaissance allusions dropped in—deconstructed breeches, jerkins, and smocks—as well as patterns based on a creatively mixed-up palette.

The Homme Plissé models walked the finale just at the beginning of sunset, heading off towards the who-knows-where and when of this brand’s next chapter of self-expression."

https://us.isseymiyake.com/collections/hommeplisse/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Rick Owens SS'18

Home stretch for fashion month...here we are at Paris Fashion Week, and the incomparable Rick Owens who seems to be orbiting further and further away from "fashion" into conceptual art. I don't think I have ever posted another writer's take on a show in its entirety, but I feel compelled to share with you fashion journalist Luke Leitch's Vogue.com review of the show and collection. Not only is it good, succinct writing, but it encapsulates some of the things I have been trying to say about Owens for a while now.

"At the very end of this epic, epic show (a banger of a show, monumental, the show of the season) Rick Owens appeared to take his bow. He was far, far away from the photographers and audience, high, high, high above the Palais de Tokyo’s courtyard at the top of a triple-twist, scaffold-fixed, gantry runway he had built for his models to slowly descend. He looked minuscule, a lean, long-haired dot in the sky.

In his notes Owens said, 'My recent absorption in Land Art—architecture unleashed—is about the human need to try to find order in wilderness . . . maybe as a futile attempt to put a mark on it as a stab at immortality.' The monumental work of Andy Goldsworthy, James Turrell, et al. is absolutely a parable for humankind’s valiant but ultimately bound-to-fail imperative to leave a mark that outlasts it. Yet a far better one is probably the work of a fashion designer, whose work is the artistic equivalent of the luna moth. However bombastic and attention-seeking the setting, the product’s life span is the blink of an eye. For a designer with genuine artistic impulses such as Owens, that must be an interesting bone to gnaw on.

The models took around two minutes each to slowly walk the gantries and staircases that eventually led them to a runway across the low stone pool of the courtyard, down some more stairs again, then backstage. They started out as dots in the distance, like Owens at the end, then slowly loomed up in front of you. At first the clothes were raw and artfully primitive—some shorts (man in his natural state, but not quite) then eight or so looks of technical caveman wear in dull whites and earthy neutrals, all affixed with gauze or pleather modular pods, some accessorized by lumpy bags with oversize survivalist paracord strapping.

Then, evolution. Menswear’s big bang. The pant! Owens’s—at least at first—were prettily tapered with a comely cinch at the waist, worn below torn tank tops that soon evolved into dark fitted shirting. Then we rushed forward again, into a long and fascinating interrogation of the tailored jacket. Why the jacket? Well, as Owens said in those notes, 'I’ve focused on the suit jacket as respectful uniform, as a symbol of civilization, as elegant luggage, as personal aspiration architecture.' To this eye Owens’s tailoring looked like a subversion of all the comfortable, enabling masculine strictures the suit jacket represents—the notion of professionalism defining identity, but suppressing it too. In rough, tough utilitarian mostly black fabrics, they came either delicately shrunken or blown up, always over pants that funneled ever wider down the ankle and were meant to drag 'luxuriantly' on the ground. The jackets were cut with pockets big enough to fit a sandwich: “One of my personal criteria,” Owens said (as if he eats carbs). Around these were sprinkled triple-layer tank tops, each pulled apart to create a sense of looking into and through the garment to the man underneath. The shoes were sneakers with laces held by scattered D-rings, hiker-style, and big badass tractor soles that made you fear for the models as they descended those stairways from above (one slipped, but recovered in time before tumbling).

There aren’t many—or in my experience, any—fashion shows that make you think for a second about existentialism and our place in the world and all that big stuff that drives you crazy. That’s not what fashion shows are for, after all. This was the exception. That monumental set, sadly uncommunicated in runway images, was perhaps the most significant catalyst for this. (Owens said it was inspired by 'Vladimir Tatlin’s tower set to Led Zeppelin’s 'Stairway to Heaven,' ' but it was also reminiscent of Escher’s Relativity.)

Yet the collection—entitled Dirt—was an in-cloth reinforcement of that so-well observed truth that 'Golden lads and girls all must/ As chimney-sweepers come to dust.' All our fancy raiments count not a jot in the end, and if you get too big for your boots—even boots as big as Owens’s—you’ll only end up disappointed. This was a huge show about humility."

https://www.rickowens.eu/en/US

BEAUTY: Clothing--Thom Browne

Thom Browne created an absolutely fascinating concept for his Fall-Winter '17-'18 show at Paris Fashion Week. Fashion journalist Luke Leitch was at the show and has an excellent description of a very conceptual presentation that was really more performance art than clothing.

"Thom Browne’s show was a three-piece suite on the suit (and its trappings), which aimed, via extreme distortion, to unpick, lay flat, then reveal as a thing of beauty the garment around which Browne has built his brand. The show’s set was 30 piles of thick gray felt—pattern offcuts—arranged in little shrine-like cairns under 30 workroom lamps.

To easily understand this show you have look at Look 1 against Look 16 and then Look 31. Or Look 2 against Look 17 and Look 32. And so on. Browne was building the same 15 suits (and variations of) in three ways.
The first 15 were arguably the freakiest. On mules (which resembled hooves), the models were cinched into bodysuits on which buttons delineated the outline of the garment Browne envisioned them as. This took a lot of buttons, and Browne’s press notes usefully transmitted exactly how many. So Look 15, my favorite simply for being the biggest and most extreme in its second part iteration, was comprised of 1,059 of these buttons, which were the stitches that linked and defined the outline of a double-breasted suit and a double-breasted greatcoat. Really, though, you had to stare pretty hard at the buttons—or read the notes—to get any of that detail for the first 15 looks. The chief impression was of a tentatively treading band of boardroom brothers locked forever in a John Cage–soundtracked endless commute, mitigated only by whatever would fit in that rolling suitcase—“Champagne!” Browne said—and the softening lenses of those blinkering helmet-masks.

Section two laid out the idea. Every look delineated in section one was represented in the flat sum of its parts from the pattern. These were worn half at the front, half at the back. By showing the suits and coats and even the shoes—which were uncobbled asunder—in two dimensions, Browne was leading us to consider their intricacies in three.

Section three put everything together, via button: Those looks were finally tailored into a more conventional whole. Of course, they were barely conventional at all. Hems zipped up and down more dramatically than the New York Times’ pre-election winner projector. Hot pants over leggings are simply not done, old boy. Yet, crazy as Browne’s interjections into the architectural niceties of suiting sometimes were, they still honored the spirit of them.

Afterward, Browne explained what this show was about: 'Playing with proportion. And an appreciation of making clothing really well. Taking all of the pattern pieces and then making an installation of the pattern pieces . . . sewing it all together, buttoning up on the body. That’s what it is! It was a simple idea of playing with proportion.'"

This collection so reminds me of Browne's FW '15-'16 collection, previously here, in which he showed Depression-era business men in threadbare suits dreaming of going back in time to more prosperous days. Each look came out in a set of three: completely worn out in the present, slightly worn in the immediate past, and pristine in the golden days of memory. There is something satisfying about seeing a concept unfold in threes this way. Past, present, future--yesterday, today, tomorrow--below, middle, above. In a strange way, it has the air of mysticism about it.

Deconstructed brogues

Elongated proportions (center) fronting the deconstructed version (right) of the actual suit (left)

https://www.thombrowne.com/