A curious thing about this evening s Rag Bone presentation: The theme du jour was parkour, that pickup sport that sees urban aerialists turning the city into a stage for gravity-defying jumps and flips; meanwhile, the Rag Bone clothes inspired by the parkourists were shown static, on stick-figure mannequins. Designers David Neville and Marcus Wainwright emphasized flyweight materials, like ultrafine nylon or the perforated mesh used, for instance, in a button-down, or ones that had a sporty give, like the heavy-duty jersey found in an overcoat. There were also lots of straps and flaps meant to pick up a breeze and underline the sense of motion. The tapered trouser silhouette here was another nod to parkour—the last thing a guy running up a wall needs is to trip over his own pant leg—but the military elements and savvy deployment of technical materials was signature Rag Bone, uncut by external influence. For the record, Neville and Wainwright did in fact road test their clothes on actual parkourists: A video featuring Rag-clad dudes rewriting the laws of physics with their bodies screened at the presentation. But it would have been nice to see these clothes in motion, live.
