[FASHION REVIEW] London Fashion Week Mens FW17 Roundup

text by Adam Lehrer

London Fashion Week Men’s, formerly London Collections Men’s aka LCM, was reenergized for the Fall-Winter 2017 season. Chalk it up to Brexit or Trump or all the existential uncertainty that arises in the wake of political devastation, designers are innovating once more. I was happy to see fashion designers starting to mess around with silhouettes again, no longer content to ape the oversized everything innovations of Demna Gvasalia; the London collections featured a plethora of big, small, skinny, baggy, tailored, sharp, clean, jagged, and everything in between set of shapes. There was less emphasis on sportswear and streetwear, with designers even finding new life and new ideas in the most traditional of menswear garb: the shirt, tie and trousers look. The message seemed to be that the creative class needs to be taken seriously, but we must also find ways to maintain our individuality in this conservative coup. Designers seamlessly blended the bizarre with the traditional, the maximal with the minimal, and the suit with the sporty.

Martine Rose Fall-Winter 2017

British menswear designer Martine Rose has had a subtle but profound impact on the introduction of underground sub-cultures to the palette of menswear design over the last 10 years. She has referenced the style and sexuality of Robert Mapplethorpe, the poetic genius and masculinity of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, and the liberated glory of ‘90s ravers in her own collections, located the sub-cultural importance of workwear labels like CAT and Timberland in collaborations, worked extensively with the now defunct streetwear/music project Been Trill, and even consulted on Demna Gvasalia’s now iconic Balenciaga menswear debut. The Balenciaga consultancy manifested slightly in Martine Rose’s Fall-Winter 2017 menswear presentation, the designer’s first catwalk since 2013 and her first to heavily feature tailoring (right down to the neck tie). Rose has always had an ability to slightly alter staple menswear pieces to hint at punk undertones and sexual subversion. The collection dealt with everyday workers: the bus driver, the real estate agent, the banker, and the office worker among them. The collection’s central question was, “How does a man hold on to his individuality when entering the professional world?” That is why this collection connected so deeply. That is the most resonant clothing concept in the modern world. Every day, we have to dress in accordance with our institutions’ dress laws while holding onto icons of our selves. The collection offered simple shirt and tie looks in shiny and ostentatious silks and beautiful/ugly colors of orange and baby blue. The tailored jackets clung loose to the frames of the models, but not to the point of making a statement, seemingly more concerned with nonchalance and comfort. The nylon jackets and coats in the collection often concealed the restrictive office wear in youthful nylons, sometimes with the sleeves hanging off the shoulders nearly unattached. The collection was exceedingly sensible. I’d wear just about all of it. This is how you conform to standards without losing you sense of identity.

Craig Green Fall-Winter 2017

As brands grow and gain success, it is typical for them to start introducing more palatable and accessible elements to their collections. These are the products that can be repurposed and resold each season: Vetements and its now staple reassembled jeans, Raf Simons and his Adidas Stan Smith sneakers, Hood By Air and its branded t-shirts. Craig Green’s brand is undeniably growing; selling like crazy and earning Green a CFDA award for menswear design in the process. But almost like noise rock band Royal Trux did by signing to Virgin Records in the ‘90s and using the major label money to create highly iconoclastic and idiosyncratic rock records, Green has been using the freedom success has brought him to introduce more ideas, concepts and radical aesthetic gestures into his brand. In my opinion, his Fall-Winter 2017 collection is the best damn collection he’s had so far. Introducing heavy tweeds, Green used the durable fabric for severe all-over looks: statuesque jackets with ropes tied around the waist, wide leg trousers, scarves coiling around the neck, and a waist piece that could possibly be a bag, a cape or both. See, with Green fashion is about subverting the “form follows function” rule. For Green, form IS the function. Everything is designed for multiple uses and styles of wear, and the clothing takes on the form of its very purpose. That is at the essence of Green’s avant-garde sculpture. Padded satin looks (also head to toe) are topped off by a vest with belts wrapping around it, allowing the vest to take on a mass of potential ways to wear it. The most remembered looks of the collection will undeniably be the embroidered cloaks that resembled a monk wearing ornamental Korean carpets as religious garb.


Vivienne Westwood Fall-Winter 2017

Ever the political firebrand, Vivienne Westwood used her Fall-Winter 2017 collection, Westwood’s first show on the menswear schedule comprising both menswear and womenswear lines, to further illuminate on the imminent disaster of global warming and corporate culture’s blatant disregard for it. Though it’s not what draws me to Westwood’s output, I firmly disagree with people questioning Westwood’s environmental intentions. Like any creative discipline, fashion can’t alter the political landscape so much as it can provide a conduit for awareness. Pushing awareness is beyond reproach. It’s a good thing to do. But at the end of the day, activism isn’t going to convince me or anyone else to buy any clothes, and Westwood’s collections for a few years seem to have missed the mark. But this collection hit the mark. Like Vivienne’s best output, it balanced the torn and tied together messiness that she got known for alongside some fantastic, wearable, and excellent quality traditional pieces. For every see through sweater dress was a sensible tailored double breasted blazer (made rocker cool with extensive finger rings and black leather boots). Women in baggy plaid suits, embroidered nutcracker jackets, stitched together pants and shirts, and abstract crowns made this a decidedly classic Westwood collection polished with a Victorian sheen. I quite liked the all-over camel early 20th century stage coach looks of a cashmere cape over a three piece suit styled with polished leather boots. the 50th look in the show, a patchwork crewneck sweatshirt with matching pants and black boots, is a rare runway look that I would wear head to toe. Daily. For years.


Kiko Kostadinov Fall-Winter 2017

Kiko Kostadinov is a rare designer on the London circuit. Instead of finding his inspiration in raves and clubs and sub-cultures, Kostadinov seeks to elevate uniform garb. His brand is for men that work, technicians and craftsman if you will. But instead of plumbers and custodians, Kostadinov seeks to give the comfort of uniformity to the world’s painters, sculptors, photographers, jazz musicians, and poets. There are very few designers elevating simplistic and clean silhouettes like Kostadinov is. The FW 2017 collection was minimal and expensive. Military sweaters in jet black came with wide legged wool trousers fitted with a tool belt, double breasted coats clung tight to the body refined and polished to a sheen, and jumpsuits were replete with multiple pockets in light wool fabric. Kostadinov discusses his desire to create a classless vision in his collection. Let’s face it, that is impossible. His high fashion price points ensure that working class people will never wear his clothes. But he is designing clothes that can be work through the bulk of life. Can’t wait to see the work Kiko does as creative director for Mackintosh coats.


JW Anderson Fall-Winter 2017

It gets hard writing about designers as they achieve stratospheric success. JW Anderson is certainly one such designer with his domination of CFDA womenswear and menswear awards and not to mention his total rebranding of Loewe that resulted in the brand becoming as associated with conceptual architecture and poetic appropriation as heritage Spanish luxury under his reign as creative director. But his collections are exciting no doubt, and he benefits from being able to tap into that “of the moment” resonance in his work. As per usual, the knits were beautiful and bountiful and the flares were wide and fey. But there was something palatably arcane within the collection, perhaps inspired by contemporary culture swaying back towards the bad ol’ days? Anderson also has a knack for finding the most overdone menswear looks and repurposing them for a taste of the uncanny. The 12th look in the show was sans description the minimal skinhead look: bomber, button down, and jeans. The kind of look that Raf made high fashion almost 20 years ago and Jerry Lorenzo made look tired and lazy with his overpriced philistine brand Fear of God. But JW makes his satin bomber fitted and sharp and adorns it with knit graphic patches and pairs it with a pair of jeans beautifully hand painted with a heaping of religious imagery and then decides the look works best with flip flops that look like flippers. And you know what? He was right.



Xander Zhou Fall-Winter 2017

Beijing-based designer Xander Zhou’s talent for utterly fucking with menswear proportions and silhouettes is vastly underrated. Like many designers of his age group, he wears his Raf Simons influence rather proudly and like the great Belgian has an obsession with youth culture that informs his designs. But Zhou’s collections are wild, dirty, and untamed in a way that Simons and his fellow intellectual Belgian designers aren’t. His Fall-Winter 2017 collection was his best outing yet, displaying his seamless hybrid of luxury and streetwear and drawing in all sorts of outer limits influences. Zhou displayed a fetish for misbehaved prep school boys in his first couple looks: models wore cropped vests over cropped button downs with ties resembling trash bags worn over the shoulder (dress codes can be fun when you know how to fuck with them). Those tailored looks continued with the addition of leather duster coats (the ones favored by Robert Mapplethorpe who is having a major fashion reincarnation this year). But Zhou’s true nastiness lies in his disregard for menswear rules. The double breasted blazer is turned into a biker dude leather daddy jacket. Denim jackets are elongated and contorted into deconstructed overcoats. The workman staple that is the jumpsuit is trimmed at the waist and given a day-goo dye job and another connotation rises to the surface. Zhou has eluded the press raves that so many of his contemporaries on the London schedule are lavished with on a regular basis. That needs to change; his clothes look like nothing else out there at the moment. That’s not easy in this hyper-saturated market.



A-Cold-Wall Fall-Winter 2017

I’ve been thoroughly taken with British designer Samuel Ross’ brand A-Cold-Wall since first coming into contact with it a couple years ago mindlessly browsing the Hypebeast website (a bad habit I’m happy so say I’m fully detoxed from). The brand functions as a conceptual art project cum streetwear brand from which Ross examines the disparities between working class culture and high fashion. Using a minimalist color palette informed by the dreary buildings and walls of low income London neighborhoods, Ross has introduced a surprisingly striking body of products ranging from French terry graphic hoodies to Nylon ponchos to tote bags. It’d be easy to dismiss an elevation of working class garb as well, a dismissal, but Ross has located something beautiful and pure in this style of dress. His Fall-Winter 2017 presentation was his first show using a cat walk. Ross celebrated the occasion by stepping well outside his comfort zone presenting both men’s and women’s collections, adding tailoring into the mix, and introducing some bold fabric pairings. Collection stand-outs included a technical satin overcoat, a wool sweatsuit, a leather t-shirt paired with wide legged trousers, and a white mesh suit and the whole collection was paired with Ross’ simplistic Nike Air Force 1 collaboration. 


Cottweiler Fall-Winter 2017

The design duo of Matthew Dainty and Ben Cottrell have been hard at work, introducing this Fall-Winter 2017 collection just days before their much anticipated collaborative line with Reebok debuted at Pitti Uomo. The conceptual sportswear brand seems to be evolving past its minimalist beginning into something more vibrant, ostentatious, and showy. Cottweiler has always been about the fetishization of sportswear and the duo nailed its approach in its early seasons. Now, they are embellishing that fetishization. Cottrell cited an “apocalyptic” vibe to this collection but honestly, that tag could apply to just about anything and has become a near unbearable fashion design cliche. What I saw in this collection was flash. The satin tracksuits were richer in color, the sports designs were over-emphasized (a sleeping bag worn as a cape, for instance), and the accessories were plentiful (electronic navel piercings and handblown UV glass pendants). Cottweiler obsesses over dual nature of sportswear: good for playing sports, better for dancing your nut off. This was the comfortable, breathable club wear that a luxury price tag offers.
 


MAN Show (Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, Feng Chen Wang, and Per Götesson Fall-Winter 2017)

Must make mention of another excellent Top Man sponsored MAN Show event that demonstrated the talents of three designers, all of whom have shown collections at the event previously. All three collections demonstrated an escalation in the clarity of the participating designers’ visions. All three designers fall firmly into the category of avant-garde fashion and occasionally into the field of nonsensical inscrutability, but appear to be trying to push their concept into wearable products. Swedish designer Per Götesson presented his collection almost entirely in denim and introduced a multitude of silhouettes that you’ve surely never seen that tried and true fabric take form in prior. London designer Fang Chen Wang used leather and foil to drape all manner of architectural fuckeries over the bodies of a diverse cast of models. But the big story here was the British raving wunderkind Charles Jeffrey and his Loverboy label. Jeffrey is tapping into the late ‘90s rave fueled moment of madly inspired fashion design, but somehow makes his collections more contemporary by reaching for the antiquated. For every super cool looking oversized thrashed Freddy Krueger sweater, there are ten looks that look like ecstasy fairyland versions of Victorian London suits. Fueling the macabre strangeness of the presentation was not only Jeffrey’s wild club kid friends dancing in the background but the incorporation of several fine art sculpture pieces that surely can’t be expected to be sold by any reputable retailer. One looked like a gigantic American flag themed cone head and one was the grim reaper. I mean that in the literal sense. 

Willfully Bizarre: The 8 Best Designers at LCM

Photograph by Morgan O'Donovan

Text by Adam Lehrer

London Collections: Men has arguably been the most exciting of all the fashion week’s for some time. With a slew of shows highlighting young talent (Fashion East, Central Saint Martin’s Graduate Show, MAN), it seems like every year fashion heads are treated to some new, mid-20s designer that looks poised to offer the world entire new codes of dress. But a whole lot of those once-young designers have become veterans: JW Anderson, Nasir Mazhar, Craig Green, Christopher Shannon, Christopher Kane, Matthew Miller, and more. These brands have found their target audiences while still continuing to expand upon and hone in on their wildly diverse aesthetics. This all seems to have resulted in a more matured and refined, if still wildly eccentric, London Men’s fashion week. These designers have already presented exciting and fresh ideas on how men should dress. Now they are trying to build viable global businesses. The primary takeaway from LC:M SS 2017 was that designers need not dumb down their ideas to become commercially viable, in fact it sometimes feels that the more willfully bizarre designers are becoming the most successful within London’s fashion circuit.

 

JW Anderson: The Modern Man Is Actually a Boy

JW Anderson’s clothes on his eponymous label (less so in his role as creative director of Loewe) are loud, goofy, and juvenile. And I mean that in the most complimentary of ways: his designs are fun. Anderson seems to embrace the overt kookiness of his collections, whether by presenting his FW 2016 collection over a Grindr live feed or extending his customer bases to Hip-Hop heads with a collaboration coming out this month co-designed by A$AP Rocky and to art-school dropouts with a collaboration with Larry Clark. His penchant for spontaneity manifests equally in the actual aesthetics of his garments. That juvenile flair became the focal point of his SS 2017 collection with its primary influence being French aristocrat, novelist, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s titular character in his 1943 novella, Le Petit Prince. Literary critics often express their belief that Saint-Exupéry drew upon his own childhood for the book. Therefore, Anderson finds influence in the idea of young boy that has immeasurable access to art, fashion, and culture. But how does a boy process that information to find his own individuality? That’s the question that Anderson seems to be asking here, but revising the concept for the modern world. Modernity is Anderson’s ultimate end game. How did this manifest? Well, there was an arresting air of mish-mash in this collection: Pollock dribbles on long tunics, Surrealist prints, masculine utilitarian workwear draped over feminine skirt-length shirts paired with purses. The collection really nailed its concept: it was easy to imagine a young boy trying to figure himself out. Here was a boy trying to figure out what kind of art he liked, the politics he would align with, and where he lies on the gender and sexuality spectrums. Like the best designers, Anderson sells highfalutin ideas in packages of both high and lo-brow beauty. Even better? Anderson has learned business. There were products here that any man could buy and make work for himself, from a bomber jacket to those spectacular goggles all the models wore. The influence of Demna Gvasalia also felt palatable here with the ultra-long sleeves and architectural shoulders. Pioneers acknowledge other pioneers, I guess.



Craig Green: Bedding as Fashion, Fashion as Poetry

Craig Green is the avant-garde menswear designer du jour, but his SS 2017 collection felt like a step forward to commercial viability. While the designer still showed great imagination when it came to conceptualizing function in garment construction (hoods constricted to the head like bonnets, jackets that only covered the wearer’s front), it was also actually quite easy to imagine incorporating some of these pieces to one’s wardrobe. The brown coats, deconstructed and accessorized by multiple studded belts, are wildly adventurous but fit so poetically as to not make the wearer look ridiculous. Craig also seems interested in the garb of other cultures. He isn’t one so solely look at just Grime, or just Punk, but he has great care for the beauty of well-made garments. Many of the looks seemed to recall the simple but abstract look of wearing bedding around the house when waking up in the morning, but made to perfection and tastefully pin-striped. Craig’s clothes are also hard to write about, truth be told, but the hype around him makes perfect sense while watching his shows. Like Rei or Raf, the fashion show is to Craig what an installation is to Wolfgang Tillmans: the perfect summation of his creative thought process distilled for the world to witness and ponder.



Nasir Mazhar: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It (Just Build on it a Bit)

Nasir Mazhar has found his sub-culture. He is Grime’s high fashion patron saint, and no one does hyper-stylized sportswear as well as him. After a couple of all black collections, Nasir incorporated some outstanding color-blocking into his SS 2017 collection. The show started off with a look structurally similar to the past two collections: a magnificent track suit that was both loose-fitting but cut close to the limbs of its model. But as opposed to all-black, the jacket and pants were two-toned in black and a deep burgundy. There were some clothes that looked new for Nasir: a baby blue denim vest, a sleeveless fur coat dyed green, short rights with the upper legs exposed. But mainly, Nasir mainly dressed his diverse and gym-hardened models in a variety of sportswear with a flurry of utilitarian details (harness straps). Some might have grown bored with Nasir’s approach but that doesn’t matter. He’s found his customer base and the tracksuit to him is what jeans are to Levi’s: an utterly perfect product that customers will want to buy again and again. All Nasir needs to do is find new color patterns.
 

Matthew Miller: Early Skinhead Culture (Minus the Politics)

By now, we rightly associate skinhead culture with Neo-Nazism. But in its early days, in the ‘60s, it was actually defined by its rather progressive adherents equally drawn towards mod culture as they were towards the music coming out of Jamaica (Dub, early Reggae). Early skinhead culture, which has been basically eradicated from counterculture history due to being overshadowed by its far right nationalist counterpart, served as the primary influence for Matthew Miller’s excellent SS 2017 collection. Miller, however, said he tried to leave politics out of the collection (out of the ordinary for him), and for the better. By largely eschewing political sloganeering, Miller focused on the vibe of the movement. It was a softer take on skinhead classics, like bomber jackets and sharp cut blazers cut with sensitivity and draped, not to mention some lovely womenswear pieces. The clothes somehow managed to look hard and intimidating, while still revealing a femininity in the wearer, harkening back to a tough guy culture that preached equality and let itself be open to cultures from around the world.


Grace Wales Bonner: A Personal Reflection on Regional Styles

LVMH Prize-nominated designer Grace Wales Bonner, at age 25, has lit a match under the ass of the fashion industry: “Luxury can be marketed towards more people than just privileged whites,” her collections seem to say. Her SS 2017 collection, her debut on the LCM schedule (outside of the MAN show) was dedicated to the 1930 crowning of Ethiopian king Haile Selassie; a man both worshipped and reviled. In reality though, the clothes felt like a chic and European envisioning of traditional African garments. Though Grace’s garments have been nabbed up by a plethora of womenswear buyers due to their feminine cuts and decoration, she still uses dudes exclusively in her runways. She welcomes the business but she has, at least up to now, stayed true to her dream of the modern black man and shown little care for the played out gender fluidity trend. Alexander Fury, a critic far more experienced (and let’s face it, better) than I, noted in a review for Vogue how personal Grace’s collections feel, imbuing the experience of growing up with a Jamaican Dad and British Mom in London. The SS 2017 collection merged the ceremonial styles of Selassie with uber-luxe decoration, recalling the Sunday morning church styles of people of all backgrounds dressing to the nines and men getting away with any manner of flamboyant sartorial gesture. Grace is also primarily a designer of men’s suits, and yet she feels as radical as any designer on the circuit. Has there been a suit designer that has felt this anti-establishment since Rei Kawakubo started introducing menswear in the ‘80s? I doubt it, and fussily dressed men all over are learning whole new ways to wear their suits due to Grace’s work.


Kiko Kostadinov: The Fresh Prince of High-Concept Workwear

While still a menswear student at Central Saint Martin’s, Bugarian-born 26-year-old designer Kiko Kostadinov designed a 20-piece capsule for Stussy’s 35th anniversary that was sold specially at Dover Street Market. The collection featured a range of Stussy’s well-made skateboarding streetwear staples deconstructed and elongated and sewn back together: hoodies with sleeves ripped off and sewn back on, sweatpants made of different colored fabrics, baggy fits. The avant fashion and streetwear communities went nuts, and Kiko was already poised for fashion industry disruption. After a stunning FW 2016 Central Saint Martin’s graduate show, Kiko landed an exclusive deal resulting in Dover Street Market serving as the sole retailer of his garments for a year. After having shown his SS 2017 show, it is safe to say that Kiko is well worth the hype. Kiko is all about garment construction. You won’t find any patterns, eye sore colors, and certainly not useless detailing in his clothes. His favorite designer is Yohji Yamamoto: the designer’s singularly harsh, beautiful, and unfussy workwear speaks to Kiko’s own vision of fashion: “It’s all about cut and finishing—I hate decoration,” sais Kostadinov in an interview with the NY Times this week. “There’s nothing worse than finding a pair of trousers that are cut great but covered in straps that don’t do anything.” Kiko wants to make workwear for the modern active creative man: everything from painters to carpenters to (why not?) art journalists. His SS 2017 collection featured modernized chore coats, jumpsuits, and lab coats with headwear and tool bags used as accessories. He hand-dyed all the fabrics and incorporated the technical fabric Tyvek into the mix making the garments both aesthetically rich and functional as all hell. There is a palatable fashion revolution hitting its apex at the moment, particularly with menswear. Starting with Raf and currently represented by Vetements and Gosha, the aesthetics of avant-garde and counter-culture styles have never been more present in the industry. But even those designers more often than not make clothes that are occasionally hard to imagine being worn by people outside the industry. Kostadinov offers a high fashion option to the closets of style-conscious guys with natural aversion to clothes that look too “fashion.” The type of guy who puts himself together in a smart Stone Island jacket paired with work pants. You don’t need to adopt the “Kostadinov look” to wear his clothes. He seems to be a designer not only revolutionary, but also potentially commercially viable.



Aitor Throup: Back on the Schedule (and in our Dreams)

Argentinean designer Aitor Throup was a beloved designer on the London ticket just a few years ago when he put his namesake label into hiatus and went to work with the likes of UMBRO and G-Star Raw. Well, if anyone is worried that his time spent designing with those commercial retail giants would dull his taste for the bizarre, think again. Aitor re-introduced his brand with a SS 2017 collection presented via a performance staged by puppet designer and engineer James Perowne entitled The Rite of Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter. 10 models wearing masks animated a life-sized puppet wearing all-black Aitor Throup garments and pushed it down the runway mimicking a cat walk. This went on three more times. But it wasn’t just the abstract art that made this a great collection: the clothes were ace. Technically a capsule collection made to be worn cross-seasonally, the collection employed technical fabrics in all black and white to create deconstructed staples: trash bag looking bomber jackets, t-shirts, track jacket hoodies, and saggy but sharply cut backpacks. Also a standout: the all-white sock boots that look like the best futurist high fashion shoe in a decade not made by one Raf Simons or Rick Owens.
 

Cottweiler: The Tracksuit is a Permanently Evolving Organism

The conceptual sportswear design duo team behind the label Cottweiler, Matthew Daintly and Ben Cottrell, presented their first runway show for SS 2017 as part of the “NewGen: Men” showcase. Known for conceptual showcasing, Cottweiler drew upon the idea of “a future ruin of a hotel resort,” scattering the runway with shattered pink ceramic pottery material. In soft pinks and whites, the brand’s fetishization of the tracksuit continued with the use of Italian suit linen for incredibly soft and occasionally see-through track jackets, pants and shorts. It’s strange: Cottweiler’s collections more or less look the same. But the concept is so arresting, the look so beautiful, and the arrangement so organized that the brand’s presentations have become a hall mark of ideas in the industry. Can they do this forever? Probably not. But the look is unique enough that for now, their buyers will continue to eat it up.
 

 

Further Notes...



The New Kids on the Block

With the likes of Nasir and JW Anderson entering into the second phases of their careers, there is already a new crop of young designers that look equally poised for success following strong SS 2017 collections. Central Saint Martin’s educated Alex Mullins and Parsons educated Ximon Lee (fresh off a collaboration with H&M) both employed denim experiments so visually arresting they opened up previously unseen possibilities for the tried and true fabric. Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy label used Woolrich-quality tweed and flannels, the dullest but most dependable of menswear fabrics, and altered them into club-ready and flamboyant party rude boy garb. Liam Hodges, the champion of mall fashion and Pirate Radio fans, was a little lighter on concept this season. But the clothes were still dope, with key products like worker jackets repurposed from Dickie’s but with the sleeves boosted to Vetements sizes and graphics emblazoned upon the back reading: “I’m OK.”


Also Good

There is something positively endearing about Stuart Vevers’ vision for Coach 1941. He is aiming for total commercial domination, and hitting bullseyes. There weren’t many products in the brand’s SS 2017 collection that I wouldn’t wear. He’s like the Joss Whedon of fashion, making predictably entertaining high trash for the masses. Astrid Anderson extended her luxed up sportswear fashion to a womenswear line, and it looked better on the ladies than it did on the men. Christopher Raeburn’s SS 2017 collection finally found an antidote for green fashion that doesn’t look right terrible. CMMN SWDN makes those minimal Scandanavian fashion styles quirky, fun, and uber-desirable. And, not the least bit boring.