Rag Bone, one retailer confided, is impossible to keep on the racks. The stuff flies out the door. The company s exponentially expanding empire of own-brand stores would seem to confirm that. New York, Boston, Washington, L.A., Dallas, Seoul, London… The dollar signs add up. For further evidence of growth, look no further than tonight s show. It came a full week in advance of the official start of New York fashion week, and it was, said co-designer David Neville, their first real men s show, fully separate from their womenswear outing. "In the past, we couldn t really afford to have the shows not on the same day—men s in the morning and women s in the afternoon," he added. "Now we can build it up."
For all its commercial success, Rag Bone s menswear hasn t always soared on the runway. The company has experimented with moving it on and off the official catwalk circuit—it hasn t shown its Spring collections in runway format for years—which has actually been to its credit. Despite the involvement of a variety of talented stylists, the very act of styling things up for a show tends to undercut the thrust of the line itself. It s a stumbling block the designers themselves admit. "Sometimes for us, if we go too fashion, it doesn t necessarily connect to people," Marcus Wainwright said. "[Tonight] was much calmer, it was much more pared down. I think it needed that."
Fall s collection wasn t by any means unstyled—on the contrary, it was ably kicked into gear by Tony Irvine, another talented Brit expat—but it hit a subtler, less affected note than it sometimes has in the past. Neville calls the quintessential Rag Bone idea "the mash-up of British tailoring and New York street," but here street predominated, with a slight air-force inflection. The irony was that the stripped-down approach actually made a stronger statement. The flight jackets were in some cases replicated exactly from vintage versions in Japanese fabrics ("The Japanese are so good at copying old fabrics," Wainwright marveled, "everything s identical"), but the nip-waisted bombers came in pebbled leathers in chilly new colors like mineral green. The silhouette was higher-waisted, with work pants modeled on Dickies and shorter jackets, and while there were plenty of suiting pieces, nary a tie. Instead, the accessory of note was a beanie. Tailor that.
Neville and Wainwright even hit on a pretty neat staging trick. The multimedia runway included giant projections showing slo-mo versions of the models as they passed. Rubberized yarns and coated fabrics played into that shock of the new theme. "It felt like a lot of yesterday, but a lot of tomorrow at the same time" was Neville s summing-up. Put more simply: It felt like a runway Rag Bone that even a retailer could recognize. And recognize, you hardly need to add, with a smile.
