Ranra codesigners Arnar Már Jónsson and Luke Stevens find designing fall clothes to be a more instinctive exercise than doing so for spring, which can be explained, in part, by geography. The company operates between Reykjavik and London; neither capital is known for its welcoming climate. “We talk about the summer in Iceland all the time,” noted Jónsson with a laugh. “We wait for it, it never happens.”
More practically, there’s the matter of translating the textures and earthy palette the designers prefer to work with for sunny days, but with this collection, the duo feels like they’ve hit a stride. They got there by adopting a “better design means better living” philosophy that looks back to Italian menswear of the 1980s, when Massimo Osti, the founder of Stone Island and C.P. Company, was building a legacy that continues to inform makers of functional and fashionable workwear. It was also the time when Giorgio Armani was taking the stuffing out of suits. Although Jónsson and Stevens did track down and use fabrics from companies that worked with Osti and looked at archival pieces he made, this is not a referential collection; it reads as Ranra from head to toe.
Footwear always provides clues to the designers’ collections. For spring the model is wearing very Wodehousian gentlemen’s slippers with the brand’s first sock designs. This young-old vibe is also present in the garments, many of which are fairly classic—and functional—but rendered in new fabrics and with novel treatments. Denim-weave jeans and a matching jacket in a jewel-toned blue are not dyed but silkscreened. The same is true of the railroad stripes, which were screened after the garments were sewn, creating intriguing irregularities. Cotton drill is used to great effect for khaki separates, and there are winning nylon pieces, including pants with ties and an ochre one-pocket pullover.
But Jónsson and Stevens’s use of soft fabrics made the difference here. This is the first time the duo has worked extensively with jersey, and they used a micromodal for shorts, often worn under a stiffer woven, and a featherweight zip-front sweater with a turned-under hem that created a very fluid shape. A standout jersey tracksuit with a convertible jacket really captures the soul of this collection. Without being Surrealist, the drape of the tracksuit feels somehow related to the melting of Dalí’s clock. There’s a sense of becomingness here, a sense of the designers ever so gently settling into spring.
