Tag: runways

Christopher Raeburn Spring/Summer 2016 London

The bulk of the schedule's menswear shows are based around the Old Sorting Office in Holborn, a strange stretch of mid-town real estate that has little connection to the fashion industry; that all takes place much further east, in the lines of north-south streets that follow the city's ever-changing frontiers. But walking from Holborn to the Richard James show this morning was a walk back through menswear history – from Covent Garden in the Nineties to Sixties Soho, to pre-war Savile Row and on to Jermyn Street and the gentleman's clubs of Pall Mall. There, amidst statues of portly Victorian generals and smugly triumphant explorers, Richard James unveiled their latest collection in a long underground space overlooking St. James' Park.

“I was looking at people who are so natural in their clothing, they think they’re blending in, but they’re totally not. There’s a real freedom to it,” said James Long.

In his typically cryptic style, J.W. Anderson treated the audience to a show that we have yet to understand – a peek into the confluence of #pastpresentfuture, as the designer put it on social media.

The title of father-and-son team Joe and Charlie Casely-Hayford was nicely apposite for London menswear's themes as a whole: OF INDETERMINATE ORIGIN. That's not to say you couldn't have picked apart all the disparate threads of this, or any other of this week's shows: Nineties hip-hop, Sixties Mod discipline, rave-era Ibiza, Northern Soul, and all the other reference points that have clung round every collection. It's that all those things have become so melded together, so fused into something familiar yet strange, that the points of origin matter less and less. Instead, they're elements garbled in translation, warped and stretched into hybrids so far evolved that they've become almost entirely separate things.

One of the most striking outfits in Matthew Miller's Spring presentation featured a smartly tailored blazer over a linen tunic that hung in shredded tatters.