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The rough and tumble menswear audience has exited Paris to accommodate the haute couture squad. That’s given us time to collate the numbers and discover which menswear collections made the greatest impressions on Vogue Runway this season. In this pre-Olympic season, six of the shows (and one presentation) took place in Paris. However, of the three shows that ran in Milan, two made the medals podium by being among the three most-viewed of the entire season. You will have to read to the bottom to learn which house took gold.
10. Dior Men
This was Kim Jones’s 60th collection since joining Dior in March 2018, he said during a preview. Having witnessed most (if not all) of Jones’s shows in Paris since his 2011 debut for Louis Vuitton (great show), it has become long apparent that he is masterfully adept at hitting all the commercial bases for his house while simultaneously injecting seasonally unique points of distinction. This season’s was delivered via his collaboration with the South African ceramicist Hylton Els, a theme that echoed the personal notes related to Jones’s childhood years spent in Africa, which we saw back in that very first Vuitton collection.
9. Loewe
“From the ground up” and “singular” is how Jonathan Anderson broad-brushed his approach to the multiple “razor looks” in this sharpest of shows. Plenty of onlookers made the obvious gag inspired by his inclusion of Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag within the set, and jokily declined to deliver a verdict. However the real trick with this designer is not to understand whether you like his collections, but why you do (or don’t). Anderson stretches your core mental muscles in a manner unlike any other designer working today, which makes him pretty singular himself.
8. The Row
Only 30 per cent of the looks in the link were styled on male models in a lookbook that jumbled The Row’s mainline output across both menswear and womenswear — I suspect The Row’s top 10 appearance was in part boosted by that. But then looking through that lookbook, I found myself hoping that several womenswear garments (especially the Lilas pant, the Nesson shirt and everything in Look 15) would come sized for males, too. As Dries Van Noten observed this season: “It’s all one big happy world, and everybody can wear whatever they want.” If it fits, of course.
7. JW Anderson
If Loewe was “singular” and slightly severe in its rigour, then Anderson’s own-brand’s menswear (and resort) show gave a burst of levity and play: it was more akin to Miu Miu than Prada, say. Treating conventional garments such as liner jackets and reverse knits like pieces of couture, dropping a Guinness collaboration, and dressing models in knitwear houses were among the many entertaining lines dropped by the designer for his own brand.
6. Dries Van Noten
Van Noten’s last-ever show as the hands-on creative captain of his eponymous house was always going to be one of the season’s defining moments. As Nicole Phelps said in the review, his decision to leave on his own terms and give us all this opportunity to bid adieu is pretty much unprecedented. Personally, I’d expected the night to be marked by plenty of ostentatious wailing and gnashing of teeth, but instead, the show was suffused with joyful admiration and goodwill. Although Van Noten will continue keeping an eye on things, day-to-day direction of the label now falls to others — leaving it in a situation adjacent to that at Tom Ford.
5. Rick Owens
Only extremely rarely do you witness a fashion show whose designation as a “fashion show” is entirely inadequate. This was one of them. This absolute blast of a Rick Owens staging was part mass, part parade, part funeral, part tattoo, and, oh yes, part fashion show. It was perhaps most akin to the climax of an incredible production of opera. Awesome. I will definitely be watching this one again.
4. Sacai
As with The Row, you suspect Sacai’s strong performance in this list to be partly down to all the womenswear that features. But also, whatever. Because this was such a clean and inventive exploration of workwear, Ivy League and rock ‘n’ roll as the 1950s crucible of contemporary informal dress, all seen through Chitose Abe’s vision of James Dean. The Levi’s collaborations were especially gorgeous. It’s great to see such a fantastic fashion collection from an independent designer so deservedly win this many eyes on Vogue Runway.
3. Prada
Prada is perennially seen as a benchmark for progression in fashion design. This season, Mrs Prada and Mr Simons played things light, delivering a youthful collection full of look-twice details and gestures all contained within silhouettes sometimes so shrunken that you suspected pieces of the outerwear had been lifted from the models’ mothers’ wardrobes. This was all intentional, as the designing partners laid out afterwards: it was meant to reflect the instinctual directness with which an 18-year-old might throw together a look. A real-life, perennially ambivalent 18-year-old I canvassed reported that the painted-lens shades were “very cool”.
2. Gucci
Sabato De Sarno’s second Gucci menswear show saw him mix surf-inspired patterns, workwear shapes and material ornamentation in a collection that worked well. Other weather fronts were blustering through fashion on the day De Sarno showed it, but this designer is wisely staying focused on his own wave. The design dialect he deploys is visibly related to that which he developed while fashion director of menswear and women’s ready-to-wear at Valentino under Pierpaolo Piccioli — but the accent here is all about Gucci.
1. Louis Vuitton
Pitching the exclusive values inherent within luxury as a catalyst for equality is a tricky equation to factor. Pharrell Williams, however, has honed his credentials as a master producer in music for years. This show encapsulated a global outlook and celebrated difference and pride in identity while simultaneously showcasing the astounding scope of LV design expertise across multiple categories.
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