How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Body Type
It was the perfect New York Saturday. I even remember what I wear … This (admittedly, slightly misguided) line of thinking might have something to do with the fact that the women in my family regularly gripe about their bodies. And though my weight …
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Female Thor and Black Captain America: Strong characters beyond the suit
The Captain has always been the blond, bullied, 98-pound weakling with the perfect moral compass who volunteers to be part of a military experiment to make super humans to fight Hitler. Rogers becomes the buff hero who protects and defends …
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Since 2004, Engineered Garments has been the singular menswear brand in New York when it comes to vintage-inspired sportswear. With a discreet identity and an “if you know, you know” reputation for quality in fabrics and construction, there is as much mystique as there is obsession surrounding the label. The Spring 2015 collection is a testament to why.

There is a story behind this offering: Designer Daiki Suzuki looked to the now-defunct brand British Khaki by Robert Lighton and the image of the British army in India, their khaki mil-spec gear commingling with bright colors and kalamkari and paisley prints. The result was a collection of contradictions. Khaki, olive drab, navy, and gray paired with bright florals, printed canvas, and jacquard; Nehru collars, harem pants, and long shirts alongside British officer jackets and double-pleated trousers. Military and workwear tend to be sober by nature, but here much fun was had in mixing and matching patterns, in unlikely fabric combos, and in the contrast between informal and exotic with formal and traditional. More challenging pieces like the wrap-and-tie wide-leg fisherman pants added irreverent fun to a jacket and tie. Numerous riffs on safari- and military-style jackets, all executed with a balance of nuance and convention, were never quite what you’d expect. Suzuki’s design process begins with the fabrics, and so one of the greatest strengths here was in the materials—luxe tropical wool; soft, richly colored twill; bright nylon; linen blends; and more unique fabrics like a water-resistant striped cotton with poly backing.

But the British safari narrative is somehow too confining for the clothes; it too neatly categorizes the collection. Above all, this is the vision of a sportswear mastermind. Suzuki doesn’t design from historical archives or a template for what a collection should be. He finds inspiration and intuits his way through both vintage and entirely original designs. While there are staple pieces in the line—the brand’s cult following knows them well, the Bedford jacket and workshirt, in particular—every pattern is new each season, constantly being tweaked to improve and adapt based on what Suzuki feels is right. “This is something nobody else can do,” the designer said, standing in the showroom of his Garment District office. “Only I can do this.”
—Noah Johnson
Runway Feed

Nothing said “new Couture customer” like Giambattista Valli‘s collection tonight. Imagine the Alhambra Gardens. A girl wakes, maybe she’s still dressed from the night before, maybe she swathes herself in a striped sheet or slips into her beau’s pj’s. It’s bright so she puts on sunglasses. Her head hurts. She wraps it in a napkin from the champagne bucket. And she goes for a walk in the garden. There’s a dry, warm wind, blossoms are blowing, they cloud her…

A pretty picture, and Valli did it justice on his catwalk. He visited the gardens years ago and filed the memory away for access at the right moment. It was the eclecticism of the Alhambra that appealed to him, the mix of Moorish and Spanish. That mix was entirely sublimated here, but there was still a feeling for the heat of the gardens, for the richness of the flowers, and even, at the end, a monochrome catholic strictness as a kind of cleanser before a finale of skirts fluffed into an extravaganza of feathery tulle. “They’ll be the best-seller,” Valli announced confidently, because they would lend themselves so well to weddings.

“The secret of my girls is that they’re always eccentric,” he said before his show. “They don’t play it. They are.” So you could say that there was eccentricity in a skirt in pink fluoro lace laid over a striped body. But the strength of this lineup was that Valli didn’t, for once, actually cater to that waywardness. Skirts were pencil thin and below the knee, and right away that gave the collection a long, elegant, grown-up line. They were paired with crop tops, tanks, or a capelet situation that Valli liked. In the case of the full-skirted frenzy of the finale, he used tiny piped pajama tops as a counterpoint.

There was something old Hollywood about such a look, an impression Valli effortlessly compounded with dresses in a wisteria-printed mousseline that begged for Norma Shearer. Hardly the apogee of a “new” Couture customer, but entirely emblematic of an aspirational age of elegance.
—Tim Blanks
Runway Feed

A huge terrace with a fireplace—it has always been in Karl Lagerfeld’s mind as a beautiful idea, ever since he saw photos of the visionary architect Le Corbusier’s long-gone Paris apartment. “I just never found a place to do it,” he said after the Chanel show today. Until now, of course, when the gigantic forest-planting, iceberg-importing, supermarket-building extravaganzas of Chanel shows past were scaled down to mimic the stark geometry of Corbu’s designs. At either end of the catwalk were huge fireplaces stoked with digital flames. Above the mantel, a big old baroque mirror. Brutalist and baroque: A typically provocative union from a designer who skates across time like fashion’s answer to Doctor Who.

But it wasn’t simply with the setting that Lagerfeld indulged his long-cherished dream. Le Corbusier was the architect who made concrete a staple of modern design. So Lagerfeld made concrete the foundation of his collection. Concrete! In Haute Couture! When you turn it into tiny tiles, it becomes a beautiful mosaic. Who knew? Lagerfeld delightedly demonstrated the material’s unexpected lightness by dangling a string of concrete beads under the noses of journalists. “Tongue in chic,” he crowed. “Very chic.”

That twistedness was the key to the collection. The word couture implies cutting and seaming. There was none of that here. Everything was molded rather than seamed. “It’s Haute Couture without the Couture,” said Lagerfeld, tongue firmly in cheek. And yet there was look after look of a gorgeousness so exquisite it could only be achieved in ateliers that were accustomed to confronting the impossible—and mastering it. It must help that Lagerfeld always has the future in mind as he cherry-picks his way through the past. Take lace and coat it with silicone. Think pink, but think plastic, too. Tatter, shred, disrespect…and make something new. That was all in keeping with the much-touted youth-ifying of Couture. Sam McKnight’s hair and Maison Michel’s little hats perched pertly on the back of the models’ heads had the effect of a Haircut 100 cover from The Face circa 1982. The effect was compounded by Lagerfeld building his silhouette on shorts. There were coatdresses over shorts, jackets and skirts over shorts, plus the perfect shoes for shorts—sandals. Given the molded, sculpted nature of the clothes, Lagerfeld liked the ease of a flat. “The models can walk in those dresses like they’re nothing,” he said.

The show closed with a passage of long, chalk-white, almost penitent gowns, lavished with embroidery. The combination not only embodied the brutalist/baroque twinning of Lagerfeld’s inspiration, it also echoed the duality of Coco Chanel’s own life, the austerity of her professional self countered by the exotic orientalism of Coco at home. It made for a stunning contrast, matched only by the final foxtrot of Karl and his
seven-months-pregnant bride, the Kiwi model Ashleigh Good. “I like pregnant women,” he said, in keeping with his new cat-loving, godfather-ing public persona. “She looks so elegant, so noble.”
—Tim Blanks
Runway Feed

Bouchra Jarrar‘s true love is tailoring. She is a master—both technically skilled and inventive. But we’re already well aware that she cuts the best pants in Paris, and we’ve ogled her Perfectos, in leather or hand-woven tweed, for seasons. The challenge for Jarrar going forward is building on this strong foundation; for her reputation to grow, she needs to build her repertoire. She took several steps in that direction at her show today: sampling from the world of sport; tweaking her signature Perfectos; and, most persuasively of all, because it’s so far removed from her usual formula, experimenting with flou.

First the sport: Jarrar’s silk track pants were as faultless as the pleated wool trousers that came later. Polos and jerseys made from metallic thread tweeds accented with black leather and finished with striped rib looked cool—more casual than anything she’s previously done. Fashion has been borrowing from activewear for a while now, but if this part of the show registered slightly familiar, it didn’t detract from the appeal of an outfit that teamed a black leather vest with a pleated full skirt boasting a ribbed athletic waistband. To update her Perfectos, Jarrar added sculptural fillips of fabric at one hip, as if your favorite biker jacket had gotten together with a hot little 1950s cocktail number and reproduced. The effect was sexy and charming. Newsiest of all the developments were the multilayer leopard-print chiffon plissé dresses. A single trapeze dress required an astounding 50 meters of fabric because of the layers and pleats, and yet it was completely effortless, with a buoyant sense of movement. We’re looking forward to more of this kind of thing from Jarrar. At the opposite end of the flou/structure divide: The black-and-white-striped pheasant feather vests were subtly spectacular.
—Nicole Phelps
Runway Feed

Some couturiers send out a wedding gown as their final runway look; Alexandre Vauthier presented a black body-skimming gown that offered quite the peep show from behind. A pearl-embellished band running diagonally across the right cheek functioned as a decorative bridge between the lower back and the upper bum, ostensibly holding the dress together. Such asset-flaunting bait will prove irresistible to Vauthier’s
mega-muses: Rihanna, Bey, Kim, Rita. But with this collection, the designer ensured that there was more than enough of his mastery to go around, from a jumpsuit in a laser-cut pony hair that mimicked lace, to crystal-studded leather pants, to a slinky minidress covered in ribbons of python stitched to tulle. Before the show, Vauthier seemed particularly excited about his foray into a print that appeared on a silk parka and high-waisted trousers; no run-of-the-mill geometric motif, this was a reinterpreted archive find from Clerici Tessuto, the century-old Italian fabric house.

It’s all too tempting to linger over a one-shouldered dress that sparkled like pomegranate seeds (the 196,000 ruby-red stones required 1,850 hours of Lesage embroidery) at the expense of Vauthier’s stellar tailoring—straight-edged but not boxy. Patent shin guards unnecessarily accented a few leggy looks, as if he hadn’t already offered enough aesthetic armor with a pearl and crystal cardigan (120 hours of embroidery) or a series of plush fox cabans. Of course, the designer knows there will always be an appetite for the Tom Ford school of sexpot, but his point of differentiation—his expert eye for fit—can get overwhelmed by glam. Vauthier described this collection as “excessively chic,” adding a rapid succession of “très” for emphasis. And to the extent that people will be apt to remember that right cheek most of all, this was très true.
—Amy Verner
Runway Feed

The surrealists used to play a game called Exquisite Corpse, in which each artist would contribute an element to an image, fold it over, and pass it on to someone else who would then add his or her bit with no knowledge of what had been done before. At the end of it all, there’d be some screwball composite that would inevitably betray an unpredictable internal logic.

What better analogy for the house of Maison Martin Margiela‘s Artisanal collection is there than the Exquisite Corpse? The recombinant elements of today’s presentation strung together a grab bag of extraordinary bits and pieces that ultimately composed “a collective memory of Haute Couture” (or so claimed the show notes). But, typically, it was not the grandeur but the detritus of Couture—the fabric offcuts, the embroidery
samples—that the collection celebrated.

Artisanal’s modus operandi is alchemy: Turn a bagful of bottle tops into a shimmering skirt, stitch a handful of embroidered Van Gogh irises into an exotic sheath dress, and collage swatches of cashmere collected at trade fairs into a caftan. Or sew a mess of coins “sourced in various dressing-table drawers and from flea markets across Paris and Brussels” onto a flimsy wrap of fabric to make a jingly-jangly gypsy skirt. The ingenuity was enthralling; the fetishistic detailing of every hour, every bead or sequin slightly less so than usual, perhaps because the collection itself felt a little thin to begin with. It may be simply that the novelty has worn off. Or else the clothes themselves were less enthralling, more arbitrary than before. That was definitely the case with the lobster embroideries and the aluminum “I Love You” party balloon re-created as a crystal bustier.

And yet there was still a peculiar, irresistible romance in these clothes. A Paul Poiret coat trimmed into a gilet, a Line Vautrin brooch on a white cotton shirt…it’s like wearing history, which is, in a way, what Artisanal is all about. But it comes with a condition: You have to impose your history on the history of the materials.
—Tim Blanks
Runway Feed