Soft Touches, Too Heavy-Handed

By CATHY HORYN
Published: July 1, 2008
PARIS

Jean-Luce Huré for The New York Times
YVES SAINT LAURENT A silk suit worn with a sweater and suede belt.
Whether designers have been looking at the same art, reading the same books or just wishing they were anyplace but here, their spring 2009 men’s collections seem to have hit the same wall. They aren’t so much about real dreams and opinions as random thoughts.

So there is a meaninglessness about the collections, which ended on Sunday, and more than the usual serving. It’s odd to look at all the femmy touches — the puffed-sleeve blouses (can we use that word?) at Lanvin, the soft cowl-neck sweaters at Louis Vuitton, the ruffles at Comme des Garçons and Number (N)ine — and actually think that fashion is having this discussion. Now. Haven’t we had it before?

Milan designers were also obsessed with ambiguous states of gender, revealing a clavicle, um, in an arresting way. But it’s doubtful that most men care, and if they are young and already love the freak-show possibilities of fashion, they are not going to find new material here for their act.

The modern exception is Raf Simons. His show on Saturday provided a blueprint for how clothes will look.

To look at the Number (N)ine show was to imagine that its designer, Takahiro Miyashita, had gone to the Macy’s junior floors and loaded up. It was plain that he had taken a lot of contemporary styles and layered them together, making the results seem chaotic or ironic but, in any case, not thought out. And the models wore blond Dutch boy wigs. But the mood, in the end, seemed less manic than monotone.

It’s interesting to contrast Number(N)ine with Comme des Garçons, where Rei Kawakubo sent out predominantly black outfits with white or black cotton skirts. The models had mauve-colored bobby-pinned hair, and some wore the squashed, beribboned hats you associated with New England spinsters. In addition, there were black ruffled tunics, much as if a boy had borrowed one of his sister’s dresses.

So why was this collection the opposite of what it seemed to be on the surface? Because Ms. Kawakubo’s feminine gestures were not merely decorative. They were incorporated into the silhouette, and hardened by the tailored black jackets and the matchstick pants and the grid patterns of dots that appeared on some pieces. It was one of the more modern-looking collections of the weekend.


Several shows evoked the young introspective male in a warm foreign climate living on his remittance from home, a type that Gore Vidal described in one of his memoirs. He added that he avoided them. The spring 2009 version of this character (from Ann Demeulemeester) wears knee-length pants in black washed linen with a loose black jacket and sometimes a faded sweater vest. Or (from Dries Van Noten) safari linens and tie-print trousers with a natty ease.

If his remittance is rather larger, and he has no vices to support, the look might be the safety-pinned silk crepe or velvet jackets from Yves Saint Laurent, and the superfine polo shirts. Stefano Pilati, the designer at Saint Laurent, has some fresh-looking suits in this collection, in particular a three-button style in pale, silvery blue silk. And he knows how to create an individual, sophisticated palette for summer — those sand-to-blue-to-sunset-pink tones. But the character these clothes evoke seems from a well-traveled place.

This was the problem at Lanvin, too. The designer, Lucas Ossendrijver, easily constructed a bookish scenario for his loose, lightly layered clothes: washed silk khaki suits; drainpipe silk trousers with puckered side seams; washed cardigans and shirts over a beaded undershirt; and, of course, this season’s squashy straw hat. And it all came together beautifully. But without the extra styling effects of a Paris show, many of the earth-colored separates would not be all that far from Go Silk of the 1980s.

The non-event of the Paris collections was Dior. Kris Van Assche was neither feminine nor especially masculine in his slim-fitting black suits, blunted ties, white high-tops and orange-colored goggle glasses. His clothes just weren’t relevant in any way. Maybe they would have been about two years ago. Dior Homme now seems stuck in neutral.

Junya Watanabe is Mr. Reliable, delivering great jeans with hayseed patches of gingham near the back pockets and some smart casual jackets that mixed solid cotton with gingham.

And John Galliano’s big man trek from Japan to London via India produced a lot of cool, urban clothes, notably long voile Indian shirts, Japanese cartoon-colored jackets, and faded, stenciled jeans with what looked like a half kilt swinging off the backside. Mr. Galliano has taken similar head trips, but this time the effect was lighter.

The only men’s designer in Paris who seems to really think about his designs, and what they might mean to the future of dress, is Mr. Simons. No one pushes himself harder, or uses his runway as more of a public forum for ideas. Even if in your mind you can’t see someone actually wearing some of the looks he proposes this season — trim-fitting black shorts with a sleeveless white shirt or an all-in-one piece with shorts — he nonetheless opens your mind to what is possible in tailoring and fabrics.

And the future is tugging at fashion. Among the things to consider with this collection is how Mr. Simons combines the formality of the classic suit with the body-consciousness of modern sportswear. The suit jacket is stripped down — the lapels eliminated and reduced to a notch — and at the same time, the material and the finishing are impeccable. As for the black shorts, they are as sharp and spare as a modern typeface.

Mr. Simons has also used embroidery with muscle — thousands of tiny black hatch marks gradually darkening the surface of a minimalist white coat. At the moment, fashion houses are putting out mountains of products. But how much of this stuff actually means anything or has a chance of changing our eye? That’s what Mr. Simons does, now more sharply than ever.

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