LONDON, JANUARY 8, 2016

by LUKE LEITCH

Back to Hogwarts! The first show of the menswear month was all about snap catch-ups—What’s up with your hair? Does my face look suspiciously immobile? Which Jonas brother is that?—and sniffing for the first spoor of the season ahead.

Gordon Richardson and his Topman Design team delivered a collection with an Oscar Wilde skater-boy vibe. Backstage, further categorizations were pitched thick and fast, from grunge to analogue to athleisure to feminine to fearless: Richardson delicately evaded them all. “It should be the right mood for now, but whatever the right word for that is, I don’t know.”

Post Alessandro Michele, certainly. Topman and its sister are intensely sensitive to the lightest gust of aesthetic consensus; here the florals, the blousy shirt hems used as skirting under jackets, narrow waistcoats or robes, plus the anonymizing voluminous blanket/duster coats, and the lushly unorthodox color palette were touched by 2015’s nu-Gucci hurricane. There was an admirable depth to the pentimento layering of decorative fabrication techniques: Dévoré velour was double-printed and watermarked.

Jackets featured hard, defined shoulders but were unstructured below. They fell way down the body to complement loose, gently fluted trousers, invariably over suede sneakers with embroidered floral details. The silhouette inhaled again via a high-waisted tarnished-finish biker and a shearling-collared and pocketed nylon blouson. A turmeric flared suit in crushed velvet would have seemed a challenging sell 18 months ago—especially for a brand as youthful as this one—but today the suggestion seemed reasonable. More bankably desirable were the embellished washed denim looks, just a touch oversized, and those fuzzy warm overcoats.