It was an existential season for men’s fashion. That seems funny to say, considering that none of the shows or themes felt terribly heady. The biggest show came from Dior, a duh-but-huh of a collection made with Travis Scott...whose most recent prior collaborator was McDonald’s. The best collections were expressions of pure hedonism (Loewe) and pure tranquility (Lemaire). It was a season of sex, relaxation, and celebrity—not ponderous concepts. And yet the Spring 2022 shows nonetheless raised some big questions for menswear: Now that brands are expected to make videos, create photographs, and tell us how to behave, what is a fashion designer’s job? And now that the biggest stars on earth want to be collaborators, how big should fashion be?
Dior sees fashion as a worldwide spectacle, now inextricably linked to celebrity. The Spring 2022 show was designed in collaboration with Travis Scott, the 28-year-old rapper beloved by Gen Z who helped usher in our era of style esoterica—skinny-baggy pants, wild Japanese garments, archival rarities, and flannel shirts—and whose collaboration with McDonald’s last September led Forbes to crown him “a corporate brand whisperer.” (As much as the purists might hate to admit it, Dior, too, is a corporation.) When La Flame and Jones came on the runway to take their bow, Jones gave a friendly wave to the audience while Scott stared at his phone, which summarized the show’s modus operandi: “What are they saying online?”
Menswear used to be all about subcultural currency, hidden messages and cult figures—Raf Simons and Virgil Abloh have become celebrities themselves, but recall how long they were secret gods to an initiated few. Jones is a master of all that—his specialty is adapting subcultural interests, from artists like Peter Doig to Judy Blame to Shawn Stussy, into images big enough for the global stage of fashion. A number of online critics scoffed that Scott is not a designer, but that’s not really what bothers me. It’s more the power imbalance I find curious—Jones is a designer who can cultivate followers and fanatics on his own (and has!), and he’s giving Scott too much credit as a subcultural whisperer. Part of the joy of the McDonald’s tie up was the oddity—“Hello, disgruntled McDonald’s employee, Cactus Jack sent me!”—along with its unapologetic mass-ness. Designing for Dior? That’s just too serious.
Should fashion be as big as fast food or General Mills? And what happens when it is? The Scott collaboration suggests that Jones believes menswear can no longer thrive by filtering up or out slowly, building fandom over a period of time, the way someone like Scott made Supreme and Amiri hypehousehold names. A collaboration of this scale collapses the hunt, and behind-the-scene buzz-building, that has defined fashion over the past decade—Kanye West discovering Demna Gvasalia, or Matthew Williams ascending his way to a Paris couture house through partnerships with Lady Gaga and streetwear overlord Luca Benini, or Simons’s archival work growing in stature on the secondhand market—into something instantaneous. It is fashion at its fastest.
The problem with hating it is that the clothing was awesome. I loved the big sweaters and the new haute joaillerie and the hand-painted-by-George Condo shirts. Nicole McLaughlin—the Insta-famous designer of the croissant bra—also contributed to the collection, reworking the Dior saddle bags with a horseshoe handle. I loved the long jacket with the upturned collar that hits a little low on the hip over the flou-y, almost oozy skinny bell bottoms, in sand pink and chalky desert brown suede and cartoon cactus green. That’s just a great suiting silhouette: regal but out-there, and a more wearable, more sophisticated evolution of his flamboyant sash suit from the first few Dior seasons.
Another big question: Is it that a designer either has to be a celebrity—like Marc Jacobs or Rick Owens or Abloh—or use a celebrity? I’ve also noticed Bottega Veneta dressing more rappers—Migos at this weekend’s BET Awards, for example, and they put Scott on the cover of their most recent zine. Fashion’s relationship with celebrity isn’t by nature problematic: it seems mostly good that Jay Z wears and invests in Rhude, and Harry Styles wears Bode, and Travis Scott buys those out-there A-Cold-Wall warcore vests. But is there a way to stage a blockbuster fashion moment without forcing those kinds of connections?
In fact, the designers who are thriving right now are the ones who are thinking small and personal, and who are in the process of fundamentally rewriting the role of the fashion designer. Hedonism has always been in Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe DNA—he’s a cute guy who grew up partying in Ibiza, after all—but this was pleasure-seeking in its purest form. The power pink of his gauzy knits and little space boots practically yelled at you to put them on, especially as shot by David Sims, who casted a pugilistic mechanic peeking out of a circus tent and mulleted hunk in big shorts and tube socks and other awesomely strange faces who blurred the line between sideshow freaks and skatepark fixtures. Like JW, it was gnarly, but more daddy.
Anderson, like other designers who also show womenswear, suggested he’d probably return to the shows in September, though he said he already felt anxiety thinking about the backstage scrum. And why wouldn’t he? He is now not only a designer but an image director and a bookmaker and a worldbuilder, creating the clothing he wants to see in a David Sims photograph. This new multimedia has become a crucial and likely permanent way for brands to talk to their customers—fashion designers are now creative directors, magazine editors, priests, style guides, and life coaches.
Some designers believe the change is less about the clothes than their audience. Thom Browne got extra ambitious with his collection video this time around, making a 30 minute mini-epic about a long distance runner in the American West. The point was less actual clothing—he’s showing men’s with his women’s in a live show in New York this fall—than the “mood” of the brand, as he put it.
Matthew Williams, who presented a positively gorgeous video for an unusually Californian 1017 Alyx 9SM collection, told me the biggest change he’s seen this past year is in the appetite for video. “We’ve always made films for Alyx,” he said, but “the industry, buyers and customers are much more open to looking at fashion film as a way of presenting. They’re really watching these videos.” I’ve noticed that when I go to, say, Dover Street, groups of twenty-somethings move from section to section like pilgrims on some kind of religious journey, checking in on the various collections and genuflecting. They’re not even there to buy anything—the knowledge, and now all these books, videos, and content, are just as much products as the clothes themselves. ““People are taking the time to embrace and watch and really look and feel,” as Williams put it.
So with all that in mind, seeing something that just grooves is a relief to the eye and mind. No crisis here—we know exactly what we’re doing. Both Lemaire and Hermès are brands that always stick to their guns. This can be held against you if you’re a novelty act, but if you’re a designer like Christopher Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran, or Hermès’s Véronique Nichanian, consistency is a sign of integrity. When every brand is trying to reinvent itself, return to some other era, or get Cactus Jack to send you, there is an extremely satisfying serenity in clothing, like Lemaire’s, that is designed for the grounded sophisticate, and like that of Hermes, which makes objects for living well. Lemaire in particular lacked a certain crispness this season, but in a very good way—these were the simple cottons and khakis that a brand like Banana Republic is trying to take mass with just a few drops of fashion. Not too much. And Hermès, one of the only brands in the world with a sense of humor, showed a bit of that with very cool big shorts and tie-dyed sweaters. It was blissfully hype-free.
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