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Save up to 70 percent on fall/winter menswear at the Patrik Ervell sample sale. Shirts are $75 to $100 (originally $250 to $300), outerwear is $175 to $500 (originally $700 to $1,500), and sweaters are $100 to $150 (originally $350 to $500). Through 3/13. 35 Howard St., nr. Crosby, No. 4B, buzzer 4 (646-912-9083); F–S (noon–6).
courtesy of THE CUT
Sloane Wilson’s The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit was one of the first publicly voiced criticisms of American post-war life. Adapted to film in 1956, Gregory Peck portrayed Tom Rath, a WWII veteran struggling to deal with his memories of the war and settle himself into a hard bearing corporate world and a tumultuous domestic life…
Patrik Ervell by Shawn Brackbill for Dazed Digital
America’s legacy to fashion is that it instituted utility, minimalism, comfort, and ultimately modernity into 20th century dress . From Levis Strauss, to Claire McCardell, to Halston, it is a legacy with a breadth that extends from the most humble to the most extravagant. It has culled an aesthetic void of excess and the unnecessary — leaving only the essential. And perhaps it hasn’t been since Halston designed ease into the lifestyles of the rich and famous, or perhaps when Miuccia Prada, Helmut Lang, and Jil Sander reprised his sparseness in the early 90’s, that this truly American position on style has been taken up and championed ahead…
Notable trends include a raised and defined waist, fabric/color piecing, saturated neutral palettes, chintzed fabric, and a diverse range of silhouettes fabricated in sweater knits. The overall tone of the collections was tough and put an emphasis on protection.
The world of tomorrow has forever provoked the human imagination, prospects of the future steering our dreams toward the unknown and unimaginable. Every era conceives their own version of what’s to come, but more often than not their efforts are no more than a telling read on the needs and dreams of their present. The Paris menswear collections for Fall/Winter 2010 announced a severely futurist mission in both references to past expectations of the future as well as truly directional ideas. It is the reconciling of the two that have made this season one of the most daring and convincing.
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With the way Miuccia Prada conceptualizes, or ponders conceptualizing, you can never be sure if the humor in her collection is intentional or that you’re just not in on the joke. But after two seasons of relatively dark and brooding collections it’s a telling sign to feel the tickle of the funny bone in one of fashion’s most omniscient and enigmatic labels.
Backstage @ Jil Sander F/W 2010. Photo: frillr.com
Since taking charge of the so-called minimalist house in 2006, Mr. Simons has within 8 or so collections re-established the brand’s DNA, moving it forward into the murky cerebral waters that even Frau Sander would not dare to tread. Jil Sander has become less about modern classicism with a contemporary twist and more about full on fashion. A traditionalist could argue that Mr. Simons has dejected Sander’s respect for ease, instead designing aesthetic conundrums and missing the practicality and functionality (emotional, that is) that defined Sander’s ideas on modern living. And that wouldn’t be totally unfair. Mr. Simons is fashion’s greatest futurist, a title he inherited from Helmut Lang when Lang walked out of the business (as Sander would later do). If Jil Sander no longer resembles the paired down essentialist collection it’s creator left it as, it is due to the rigor in which Simons anticipates the future. Arguably Simon’s futurist mode is all surface; also arguable is that Sander’s subtle innovations in fabric development and tailoring were more accurate and influential. But it could also be argued that it is Mr. Simon’s take on the theme that is the right one for the moment…
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Rick Owens shot by Nick Knight for Showstudio.com and Arena Homme +
5 years ago Rick Owens represented a small niche business of luxury leathers and knits, appealing to a smattering of men who heard of the designer by way of their savvy girlfriends and their penchant for deconstructed furs and villainous Star Trek get ups. Few years before that, he was an even fainter blimp on the radar: a small L.A. eccentric with an incredible set of patterning skills, newly championed by the editor of Vogue. Since Anna Wintour plucked the hesitant designer from the west coast and brought his work to a larger audience in NYC, his influence has steadily gained and now his raw, gothic and street aesthetics have become ubiquitous, giving form to the dark albeit wealthy fashionistas in need of projecting their inner turmoil. In the days since Helmut Lang removed himself from the industry he has provided a new generation with his own kind of urban futurism: Owens anticipates a world that is in fact as cold and harsh as we fear, but resilient against this, or maybe even celebratory of it, he has found a way of designing luxury, opulence, sensuality and desire into it.
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Rene Rodriguez, Show Package: Paris Men F/W 10: Major Models
Another year and another season! January kicks off the winter’s slew of fashion weeks starting with the Milanese menswear collections. For many designers and luxury brands these upcoming weeks will be make or break as they all try to adjust to the recession and the changing mood. Will optimism shine or shall the cynics get the last word? Fall/Winter 2010-11 should prove an exciting if not telling season.
MILAN
saturday
16/01/2010 09:30 Carlo Pignatelli Outside Via Turati, 34
16/01/2010 10:15 Ermenegildo Zegna Via Savona, 56 A
16/01/2010 11:00 Ermenegildo Zegna Via Savona, 56 A
16/01/2010 12:00 C.P. Company Via Savona, 54
16/01/2010 13:00 Costume National Homme Via Tortona, 58
16/01/2010 15:00 Jil Sander Via Beltrami, 5
16/01/2010 17:00 Emporio Armani Via Bergognone, 59
16/01/2010 18:00 Burberry Prorsum Via Melegari, 3
16/01/2010 19:00 Les Hommes Via Meda, 24
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2009 has been a tough year to say the least, and fashion has been no exception. But maybe it is because of the turbulence that this year the folly of an industry has shown some real mettle: assuaging our anxiety with spectacle, forcing innovation on the complacent, charging ahead towards the new — Here are the top 9 fashion moments of 2009, just in time as a new decade dawns…
recreated color plate from Albert Racinet’s History of World Costume
The change of dress from season to season to suit the spirit of the times, the ebb tide of trends, the markers classifying us into the worlds of cool we belong to (or wish we belonged to, or especially do not belong to). Fashion is the game and while many of us might loathe it, it has cemented itself in both our culture and our own personal conceptions of identity. Clothes are not mere extensions of our bodies—more troublesome actually—they are expressions (conscious or subconscious) of who we are, at least who we think we are… for everyone to see, literally worn on the sleeve.
Fashion as we know it today was originally a luxury sport engaged in by only the extremely wealthy. The latest looks, wigs, boots, rings, make-up, trims, ribbons, poses, and other accouterments become folly for the deeply pocketed who used their show of excess to cement their status and to make the hurdle even higher for those who wished to make the jump to high society. It’s not that peasants and proletariats didn’t have their own trends, but practicality and economy were more urgent priorities. The industrial age was the Pandora’s box and as Singer sewing machines, computerized looms, department stores, and mail-order catalogs made clothes easier to produce and much easier to buy it was not long before the once exclusive cultural value disseminated to the masses. And from there begins the fallacy (or hilarity) of democratic fashion.
Wall Street Journal fashion reporter Terri Agins highlighted the effects of mass marketing in her book “The End of Fashion.” She details how designer names became household names; how brands that once sold their wares to the select rich found a way to get their hands into the coffers of the indiscriminate poor. And of course it didn’t help that the late 20th century saw a complete and total end to the sartorial codes of status and class as every youth, sub, and degenerate culture found its own meaning and voice—its own valid message, a recognized mainstream appeal. It enabled everyone and anyone with the raised expectation of fashion.
I suppose the idea of the scent was to evoke the energy of a sun tanned Greek Adonis, sweaty and virile, as if Pierre Bourdon was given the dirty underwear of a conquest from a stay in Mykonos as a brief.
Created in 1981 the scent defies all current trends for men’s fragrance. The move towards “clean” smelling scents, as if men needed to puritanically oppress their body odors, has created legions of fragrance that smell like bad shampoo. On the contrary, Kouros smells quite “dirty” and is mistakenly attributed to contain civet (the fecal smelling perfume ingredient procured from the glands of a cat). Perfume critic Chandler Burr declared that the scent should only be worn by the French, in France. I tested the smell with a French friend, upon taking a whiff she exclaimed “Ewww! It smells like sex, not in a good way”.
Congratulations to menswear desiginer Patrik Ervell who won the $50,000 runner up prize at the Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund awards. The designer’s auspicious use of metal oxidization to create prints for his Spring 2010 collection no doubt won him points with the judges and allowed him to stand out from the competition.
- J
Stylist Olivier Rizzo evokes Buffalo Style for Arena Homme +
The vision of stylist Ray Petri has proved itself as one of the most potent and influential aesthetics in men’s fashion. And in 2009, his mid 80’s-early 90’s defining Buffalo look is on the cusps of a comeback…
The juxtaposition between masculine and feminine, high and low, and especially hard and soft are the basics of Ray Petri’s Buffalo style. The look defined the youth energy of the 80’s and early 90’s as Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” (above) and magazines like The Face and I-D brought it into pop culture. Buffalo style redefined symbolism in men’s dress, erasing away their historical meaning and leaving the most cherished sartorial traditions fair game to subversion.
The editors from BUTT magazine have teamed up with hospitality innovator Ace Hotel to curate a selection for its soon to launch gay porn pay-per-view service.
Screenshot of Al Parker's "Inches" (1979)
It’s a peculiar endeavor considering that the internet has come to dominate the porn industry’s distribution and viewership, hotel ordered porn seems counter-intuitive if not a lost cause. Yet BUTT, a magazine that has been at the vanguard of proving the mettle of traditional print in the age of the internet, has a knack for showing the wonders of what an honest perspective and keen thinking can do in defiance of all the hype.
In the tradition of forgoing the conventions of MSG* culture, the team at BUTT has put together a series of films that aren’t as immediately obvious as Bel Ami lovers or Falcon studs. Rather, they pooled from their own individual tastes and connoisseurship developing a range of erotic preferences representing the best of their genre. Whether it is forceful brutality or a gruff papichulo that gets you off, there’s something to illicit the stirrings of horny ambition for everyone. [Possibly NSFW]