There s no mistaking Steven Alan for a conceptual designer. He makes commodity clothes, plain and simple. This season, though, Alan did tease a bit of concept: He was thinking about space, and about the uniforms people wear in space, and movies made about space travel, and so on. And so even though Alan s latest menswear collection was chockablock with staple pieces like the perfect pair of glossy twill black shorts, it also digressed into a few unexpected but appealing longueurs. Consider, for instance, Alan s mock-neck tee in white, redolent of the stuff worn by the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or his short-sleeve button-downs, with their signature trim Steven Alan silhouette, executed in fabrics such as a cartoon Martian head microprint. There was wit here. The emphasis, though, was on Alan s elevated basics—sometimes given a twist, in the case of a cropped-collar polo, or a T-shirt in cotton twill, and sometimes just finessed and re-finessed, as with Alan s soft-shouldered but not unstructured blazer, or his pieces in Japanese chambray and denim, or the super stripped-down bombers and anoraks. Not rocket science, this, but clothes your average rocket scientists—or your average cosmonaut, for that matter—would be delighted to wear.
