To Be Young Again, and in a Shrunken Suit

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 4, 2008
All men are little boys when it comes to toggle coats. Grown-up men, even balding men, can sometimes be found in department stores fondling the horn buttons, looking at them the way they might a red sports car or Gisele Bündchen, as the outerwear antidote to a midlife crisis.

“This will make me look young and hot again,” such a man may be thinking, “like Ethan Hawke in ‘Dead Poets Society.’ ”

Last week Tim Hamilton, a rising star in American men’s wear, pulled out a green cashmere toggle coat from his fall collection, which he was photographing in a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was an example of what Mr. Hamilton, who parlayed a job selling clothes for Ralph Lauren into a design role and then started his own label, does well, which is to create weathered-looking, expensive versions of clothes you could have found in any J. Crew catalog two decades ago.

His racks were filled with plaid shirts, striped turtlenecks, a leather bomber jacket, a cashmere hoodie, twill pants, bow ties, little-boy jackets and a table full of mittens so precious they can be tucked into pockets at either end of a matching scarf, so you won’t forget them.

Judging by the collections shown in New York this weekend, there may be no stronger emotional current running through men’s fashion now than that offered by Mr. Hamilton: personal nostalgia, a longing for what men wore as boys. The shrunken proportion of suits, popularized by Thom Browne and now universally represented on the runways, seems to have marked the beginning of a deeper regression into the staples of a prep school or a military academy. Are men stylish only if they are playing make-believe?

By all appearances, men are more and more interested in fashion today, and that has encouraged a renaissance in design. The problem is that many of the new collections conformed to the kiddie aesthetic to the point of being patronizing, or infantilizing, with jackets uniformly cut to waiter’s length, just below the waist, as were those at Band of Outsiders. And as were those in the otherwise electrifying collections from Robert Geller, who once worked with Alexandre Plokhov on the Cloak label, now defunct, and from Patrik Ervell.

The first exits at Mr. Geller’s show were stiffly militaristic: a general’s coat with a black leather harness, followed by a monochromatic black blazer and tie worn with jeans. The last ones were copiously layered knits shown on disheveled-looking models, who were wrapped in cable-knit scarves and shawls like apocalyptic versions of Stevie Nicks. During the show, an evolution seemed to take place — from a slim and trim geeky silhouette to a tougher, pumped-up gothic monster.

The models who closed Mr. Ervell’s show, who still looked like little boys, wore parkas and hoodies made of gold foil, as if they had just completed a marathon. The suggestion, depending on your feelings about gold, was either of glittering nomads or of an Elvis comeback. Strange, then, to describe these clothes as restrained, but the cuts were simplified to the point that minimalism outweighed ostentation.

Steven Cox, one of the designers at Duckie Brown, said before his show that the likelihood of a recession had forced designers to rethink extravagances like beading and embroidery. “It’s as if we’ve put our hands around our throats,” he said. He seemed to be apologizing. But the collection, straightforward suits worn with too-short nylon zip jackets over them, turned out mostly all right — save for a few ideas that looked like mistakes, like elbow patches sewn on the front of the sleeves instead of the back, where the, uh, elbows are.

At an informal Band of Outsiders presentation, the designer, Scott Sternberg, showed more shrunken suits than anything else, in gray flannel or brown velvet and worn with rep ties or bow ties with tight vests. He added some plaid pants this season, and a furry trapper’s hat, which looked cute but didn’t exactly represent a seismic shift in fashion.

Likewise, the new label Shipley & Halmos, from Sam Shipley and Jeff Halmos, two former Trovata designers, offered more options for men who have recently mastered the Windsor knot, like a sharp leather bomber jacket with extra-wide ribbed cuffs.

What has separated Rag & Bone’s brand of dark and moody denim and urban tailored jackets from, say, Kenneth Cole, was at best a fine line — that is, until its show on Friday. The designers, David Neville and Marcus Wainwright, seem to have understood that their moment would not be a long one if they didn’t stand for something besides Ms. Bündchen, in the front row, looking good in their pants. How hard is that?

This collection, playing off military dress uniforms remade in immoderate fabrics, proved that Mr. Neville and Mr. Wainwright have the ability to make some seriously daffy ideas in men’s wear look commercially sane. Several models wore rings or necklaces made of what appeared to be gold-plated barbed wire, and their formal suits, in royal blue or gray (the Civil War in cashmere?) were shown with pants that were described as jodhpurs. This was evidently a reference to a slight elongation of the fly and a stylist’s trick of cinching the legs around the models’ ankles with bands of fabric — fairly safe stuff, even for the Citadel.

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