London Collections: MEN

“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.

The challenge facing Sarah Burton each menswear season is considerable, yet can be concisely summarized: How to work within the McQueen confines of tailoring, without winding up on the stuffy side of the fence?

As he perused an Agnes Martin exhibition recently, Massimo Nicosia was struck by a quote describing her work as, “a repetitive use of a repetitive medium.” The man at the helm of Pringle of Scotland.

This collection was full of fine clothes which many men—this one included—would be delighted to alight upon in-store.

Richard James has a mean copywriter. Read this abridged opening stanza from his Fall presentation notes: “The collection sounds its horn hard, hoists the red ensign, and puts its exotic cargo under a silver gray sky at London’s docks in 1935.”