After 14 days straight of reporting the curated unreality of the menswear shows, you can be left a little delirious. Radical pants, rude wranglers (you know who you are), and strange encounters haunt your restless dreams. By day, so much weird stuff happens that it ceases to feel weird at all.
Take this for example. Yesterday after Loewe, a knot of us were discussing menswear with Succession’s Brian Cox—a proud Scot. Naturally, talk turned to that nation’s great contribution to the canon. Cox was unequivocal that when wearing a kilt, everything else under it should be au naturel. “Because what’s the point of the kilt if there’s no air circulation?” he growled with the assurance of Logan Roy knifing a child.
Fast forward 24 hours and we were sitting outside at Sacai in the Sorbonne, as the mercury hit 91 degrees. Michel Gaubert’s soundtrack was as banging as we were sweating: seriously. Suddenly the beats receded to be replaced by unmistakeable dread strings (sans piano) from the credits of Succession. And as they played, out came a model wearing—because of course—a kilt.
Like much in the opening section of this collection by Chitose Abe, it mixed pinstripe suiting wool and denim: white collar at the front, blue collar at the back. I was not going to ask Abe for her thoughts about freedom of movement under men’s kilts—a bit much. But there was a great deal of circulation in the air across the whole of her offer today.
An inveterate hybridist, Abe returned to the fray with an agenda to express a “positive punk spirit”—one T-shirt read “Know Future”—in outfits that explored harmonic contradiction. In other words, while all the looks were matchy-matchy, within them she used ingenious design and fabrication to splice together elements whose adjacency was strictly “wrong.” Thus the denim and the pinstripe. Abe said her childhood determination to remix her school uniform just as far as she could within the boundaries of the rules had come back to her while developing these looks.
Other examples saw Carhartt cotton duck cut into covert coats for men or double-breasted evening jackets for women, ombre Fair Isle knits expressed in what looked like tufted fleece, and stately decorative florals (as on the mega-swatches at Loewe) embroidered onto workwear bleus de travail, or printed onto silky sheer-paneled rugby shirts. Crepe sweatshirts were crafted into short and long hemmed dresses, and desert-toned MA-1 bombers sculpted into peplum skirts and sleeveless zip-ups. More hybridized Carhartt/tailoring jackets were delicately accessorized with hanging pearlescent beads behind the collar. “They used to laugh at me, but I saw the future,” went the Lil’ Louis sample on Gaubert’s typically energizing soundtrack. And see the future we did—at least as far as spring 2024.
