Richard James Spring/Summer 2018 “Atlantic” collection at London Fashion Week Men’s.
“Shape and colour are my two strong things.”
Ellsworth Kelly.
Our SS18 Atlantic collection steps back savvily to 1957 and the canny, clear-sighted confines of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it casts a keen, captivated eye over Ellsworth Kelly’s three crisp and coolly confident contributions to the cutting-edge Young America exhibition.
The spatial, openly abstract Atlantic, Bar and Painting in Three Panels broke ground for a brave new wave of avant-garde artists and cleared the way for Kelly the celebrated colourist to characterize in bold and bright strokes the ardent, altogether assured aesthetic of a nation in true, utopian transition.
This is an easy-wearing, softly shifting collection that captures all the serene style and let-loose singularities of the perspicacious pioneers of the day at play on their preferred purlieu, the Long Island seaboard.
Soothing base colours of dusty pink, pistachio, coffee, ivory and navy are interspersed by fleeting accents of green, aqua and fuchsia.
Exquisite wool and silk and linen blends give clean lines and lightness to double-breasted tailoring. Fine ribbed cotton Ottoman and featherweight wool gabardine add finesse and a sublime softness. Cotton boucle jackets lend a real depth of texture.
Raglan shoulder zip-front bombers and blousons and nuanced cotton and linen knits give a recognizably 50s feel. Prints impart perspective.
Join us as we peruse a peppy, singularly paradisiacal scene under the East Coast sun and look out to the briskly breaking, siren blue waves of the Atlantic and a brave new beginning.
richardjames.co.uk
