[ad_1]
A Man, a Tan, a Plan
To an American ear there is something intoxicating about what linguists call “Th” fronting, the pronunciation in British dialect of “th” as “f” or “v.” Like the Bronx or Brooklyn accents that are now more an artifact of folklore than part of living language, the custom is localized both in geography and class.
Though the upper-class English are known to ape it, the habit of saying “fink” for think and “fought” for thought is the proper province of what dwindling numbers of authentic Cockneys remain or anyway of East Enders, as well as those from Essex, a county that is to London roughly what Queens once was to Manhattan. That is, the place across a river never crossed.
“He finks he’s an Essex girl,” a member of the paparazzi said on Saturday outside the Shoreditch Town Hall in East London, as Luke Day, the editor of British GQ Style, exited the JordanLuca men’s wear show at the start of fashion week.
Anyone here would have gotten the reference; Essex girls are a British phenomenon. Vigorous social media campaigns have been mounted to counteract negative perceptions and pejorative dictionary definitions of them.
Yet cruise the aisles of the big department stores here at holiday sale season and you can’t miss them.
There are many defining features of the type (plastic surgery, Heffalump false eyelashes, tube tops and Balenciaga Triple-S sneakers), but the defining one may be a tan that has never been seen either on the Pantone scale or in nature. The closest color approximation is a powdery orange that falls somewhere between the actor George Hamilton’s complexion and a package of Sizzlean.
It is the brilliance of Mr. Day — and let’s generalize to say of British men’s fashion — that any accepted version of good taste is axiomatically considered something to be flouted.
Over the last few years, he has appeared on the streets and on Instagram wearing double denim; Tom Jones shags; Daisy Dukes; “Midnight Cowboy” looks that included individual rings spelling out, finger by finger, the word “STUD”; gay 1970s clone jeans and flannels; lace-front jockstraps with shearling bombers; Goa raver head scarves; embroidered Lucchese boots that were perhaps, in the end, more majorette than cowhand.
In some places Mr. Day might be marginalized as a fashion loony; here, he is an acknowledged style leader. Thus, the spectacle of him coming out of the JordanLuca show in a cowboy hat and boots, trailed by a scrum of photographers snapping away, was a jaunty welcome to another fashion season.
John Waters, the so-called pope of trash, may have been right when he said that to understand bad taste you need very good taste. (This was before he reformed and pronounced that, after having milked it for almost 50 years, bad taste was over.)
The reality is good bad taste never goes out of style. At least that’s what I fink.
As for Mr. Day, his tan was acquired in the old-fashioned, melanoma-courting way, as he said before a Grace Wales Bonner showed whose theme was colonial Jamaica.
“I was in Tulum for three weeks, and I’m wearing pastel blue to show off my tan,” Mr. Day said. “You should see the rest of my body.”
How to Style a Codpiece
“It was a taunt,” said Jordan Bowen, 34, a partner in the neophyte design team JordanLuca. (Luca Marchetto, 34, is the other half.)
He was referring to a codpiece in his show.
For a thousand reasons, male genital display seems to have gone out of style — just as, perhaps, being male has. Yet, concurrent with a shift in pronouns and all that they historically implied, there has emerged in fashion an apparent fascination with the male organ of generation.
Thom Browne showed codpieces in a men’s wear show last year in Paris, and here they were again. Why?
“It was a bit of fun,” Mr. Bowen said. “We’d been looking at our history as a country,” he added, referring to England. (Mr. Marchetto is Italian.) “And all the richness of the culture and why we aren’t seeing that in fashion.’’
What he meant by that was the phenomenal array of wardrobe possibilities that once existed for men and that has now largely disappeared. The milliner Stephen Jones said the same before a show of Edward Crutchley’s work, held inside a medieval guild hall devoted to London’s skinners, and most notable for its hats. (Memo: Bring back the fez!)
“The range of what is acceptable for men to wear became so narrow,” Mr. Jones said.
He was referring, essentially, to hoodies and sneakers. Visit even briefly the rich costume collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum, as the JordanLuca designers had, and you quickly conclude that we live in grim and sartorially spiritless times.
Take the portrait of Dudley, third Baron North from 1630, in which the subject is depicted wearing a skirted embroidered doublet, a lace ruff and a pair of court pumps ornamented with ostrich feathers and worn with laced hose embroidered with thread of silver.
On a more sober note, consider the image of a tailored three-piece wool suit by Carr, Sonn and Woor from 1951 cut with fetishistic precision and featuring details (sleeve cuffs, a suppressed waist) that, as Mr. Jones said, oblige the wearer to live up to the clothes.
“It’s impossible to say nothing about yourself through your attire,” the writer Heidi Julavits said after the publication of “Women in Clothes,” a 2014 survey, compiled with Leanne Shapton, of the fashion preferences of 639 women of various ages and social classes from around the world.
That people are more revealing of themselves in clothes than without them was one of the takeaways of the project, Ms. Julavits added, a point made long ago by the fashion historian Anne Hollander.
The codpiece was invented in the Middle Ages as “a rather visually unarousing object of utility meant to deal with an embarrassing absence close to the midpoint of that poor forked creature: man,” the art critic Michael Glover wrote in “Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art,” a hilarious and erudite book published in 2019.
The stockings that were standard gear at the time left a gap in coverage. The codpiece was the solution.
Eventually this odd knot of fabric evolved into something outlandishly ornamented. Beribboned, hooked, horned, it grew to comical size, its practical function outstripped by the symbolic one of advertising what it was intended to protect or conceal.
Then, at the advent of trousers, the codpiece vanished. No one had use for it anymore.
Reflecting that and other realities, the codpieces at Thom Browne, and then this week at JordanLuca, struck a viewer as wistful. The rest of the stuff at the show here in London took cues from earlier eras — ruffs and elbow ribbons and leg-o-mutton sleeves rendered in technical fabrics and styles that were surprisingly viable in a modern setting.
The codpieces, though, resembling athletic cups, although less functional, floated limply and redundantly atop the clothes.
JordanLuca’s designers are too young, of course, to recall a time when male genital display was a useful erotic sales tool, those bygone Peter Berlin days of crotch-sanded denims and Freddie Mercury’s shrink-wrapped junk.
It feels quaint and amusing to imagine guys strutting around advertising their ostensible virility when, as anyone who spends time online now knows, the unvarying response to any such claims now would be: “Pic?”
Passage From India
Kaushik Velendra, 28, was a 13-year-old from a lower-middle-class family in Chennai, India, when he set his cap on a fashion career, a true moon shot.
“It was an impossible task,” Mr. Velendra said before his show on Sunday. His path to London Fashion Week took him first to Bollywood (itself a stretch, since Mumbai is a long way from South India and its own thriving Tamil film industry) and jobs as a lighting assistant, a tailor and then a costume designer who eventually decided that India, with its population of 1.35 billion, was too small to contain his ambitions.
After applying to Central Saint Martins, the star-making fashion school in London, and being rejected no fewer than 16 times, he was accepted and began his work toward “a dream that is a cliché.”
The more relevant cliché about Indian designers is that, while they may dally with Western fashion, they inevitably return home to capitalize on a multibillion-dollar Indian bridal industry. Mr. Velendra had other, bigger ambitions.
“I thought, there are five major names at the top level in the world,” he said, referring to the European labels Armani, Prada, Saint Laurent, Celine and Gucci. “But there had never been an Indian.”
As the rare designer with his background — an unlettered, self-supported middle-class Indian from Chennai — Mr. Velendra aims to change all that. He may well succeed. His prizewinning men’s wear designs are based not only on male vanity, but also on the fragility that is at its core.
“All guys are fixated on how not-good-looking they are,” the designer said before a show that featured his body-shaping superhero clothing. “Even the Bollywood stars think they don’t look good enough.”
[ad_2]
Source link
