“There’s a conversation happening about where menswear is going,” said Mike Amiri. “Is it loud? Is it quiet? Well I think it’s real: going to something that people can believe in and get some sort of emotional feeling where you can look at the runway and say ‘I want that’.”
Amiri’s reality this season was, true to his process, rendered through a filter that projected aesthetic nostalgia around a fragment of fantasy relating to the cultural history of his home Los Angeles turf. The script on t-shirts revealed this season’s pin drop: Laurel Canyon, 1976. As well as being Amiri’s birth year, 1976 was a key moment in Laurel’s music scene, giving us “The Pretender” from Jackson Browne and The Eagles’ “Hotel California.”
The set might have been staged after a fantasy interior of that imagined address. The room was backed by a printed library bookshelf, floored by a carpeted collage of Persian rugs, and arranged through a runway of chesterfields, pouffes, and easy chairs. Once the guests had settled, they were served an opening section drenched in more merlot than Napa.
An opening merlot suit featured an embroidered satin yoke and tooled metal tips on its notched peaked collar: formal rodeo. A merlot military tunic jacket was bead embroidered at the shoulder and teamed with a pink satin Western tie and straight-cut brown striped wool formal pants. A merlot knit jacket in look three was an interesting mix of a show jacket and piped 1950s varsity cardigan. We saw merlot topstitched denim pants under a denim jacket patched with richly colored fabric panels and beads. Spanning Johnny Cash to Crosby Stills Nash, Amiri was translating the neighborhood’s history of musical style into a simultaneous medley.
Certain elements ran across the collection as reliable beats to frame it in. These included an abundance of eyewear, and the steady tread of cowboy style boots with multiple upper finishes—lizard, patent, etc.—and tooled metal toe caps. Amiri generally observed the same silhouette, leaning towards only infinitesimally kicked pants. Although the contrast seemed a little disjunctive at first, the ornament of the evening heavy womenswear reflected the ornateness on the men’s tuxedos. Inevitably it was the less dressed up looks—more Rose Bowl than red carpet—that seemed realer in Amiri’s Laurel Canyon dialogue between nonchalance and extravagance.
