Haute Couture

Has any musician affected menswear more than David Bowie? Of course not: The menswear business should have paid him royalties. At today’s Burberry show, the first of significance since the news broke this morning of Bowie’s passing, the house paid impromptu tribute to the most exuberantly original re-inventor of them all.

The literal incorporation of motifs you see on the streets into clothes made to be worn on them is a path well beaten, most recently by Anya Hindmarch and Jeremy Scott. Today Christopher Kane followed this road too, but went at it in entirely his own direction.

How strange that the passing of David Bowie should come as his aesthetic ghost is already haunting the Fall 2016 men’s runways. Katie Eary’s show, for instance, bore his unmistakable imprimatur—jiggy, Ziggy graphic pattern; flowing silk; and that newly coined fashionable notion of gender fluidity that’s thus far come bound up in the simple notion of a man wearing a woman’s blouse.

KTZ follows the latter blueprint: The thumping music begins and the models hit the catwalk clad in getups that vary little, but enough, from season to season.

“We don’t want change,” said Dunhill’s creative director, John Ray, this evening. “When a brand stops doing what you know will fit, I think men . . . kind of get a bit annoyed.” Truer words, at least to the style-aware gent, were never spoken. And at Dunhill, the story is one of minute evolution as opposed to revolution—no changes here.

Jeremy Scott’s Moschino is polarizing, but undeniably entertaining. His brand of humor is Pop-ier, wackier, more sugary than Franco’s, but that’s not a negative: Scott is a designer who hits the bull’s eye of contemporary look-at-me preoccupations.