For Spring, Nicole Farhi and her menswear designer, Massimo Nicosia, clicked onto their look of the season from a trip to Brighton, one of England s seaside resort towns that has known tonier days. "I visited Brighton for the first time six months ago," the Italian-born Nicosia said backstage. "I found it fantastic and strange—a bit Las Vegas in a way." That s putting it mildly. Brighton to Britons conjures visions of questionable taste, which Nicosia admitted he was courting in this collection. His referenced muses were peacocks who didn t mind standing out, come hell or high water—the Regency dandy George IV on one hand, Mick Jagger circa the seventies on the other.
A collaboration with Sunspel, the heritage English underwear label, gave rise to under-turned-outerwear hybrids: elasticated pants in boxer short fabrics and prints, nylon-treated undershorts worn with tops tucked into their waistbands. Those may work better on the editorial page than the boardwalk (and, on the subject of seaside readiness, a beachy season seemed an odd time to collaborate with Tricker s on classic brogues). Better here were the simpler tailored pieces, slim-cut slacks and light jackets in oceanic blue. Among the explicitly Brighton-referencing ideas (deck chair stripes, woven shorts modeled on woven wicker laundry hampers), printed pieces based on the Royal Pavilion s decor were best. A bon mot of Laurence Olivier s gave the collection its epigraph: "Do you know what success smells like? It smells like Brighton." It dared you to wonder whether the converse is true.
