Clashing attitude and tradition

SS15 daily roundup: LC:M Day 2
By Dean Mayo Davies | Fashion | 17 June 2014
Photography James Naylor
This article is part of Fashion Week – London, Milan, Paris, NYC

Welcome to the HERO SS15 daily roundup – the most important shows, themes and concepts, contextually curated for your reading pleasure. The best place to understand the week’s events in fashion.

The huge, primal, swaggering rock ’n’ roll of Hendrix and Zeppelin, music from the gut that shakes heaven and earth gave a great context to Casely-Hayford SS15, headlining LC:M day two. Make the collection as laboured and considered as humanly possible – then throw it out and let the attitude do the rest. Today there was plenty of attitude from designers working with the finest material, remixing tradition.

Casely-Hayford’s show literature ran over four pieces of A4, which shows you quite how much father and son design duo Joe and Charlie distill into their work. A quote from artist Julian Schnabel hovered above all – “Working with things that already exist afford you associations that are beyond your invention.”

Indeed, working with classic English menswear shapes, they moved the sartorial into the anarchic, the anarchic into sportswear and sportswear into formal, as baseball caps by Stephen Jones had their pinstripe panels perfectly lined up by hand. Footwear was by Heinrich Dinkelacker, a German brand that has been meticulously crafting handmade shoes in fine leathers since 1879. Earrings by COOPS were lined up around the ear, punk-like, and exclusive Edward Gucewicz sunglasses were realised in recovered Nigerian horn and Indian water buffalo (sourced as a by-product from land cultivation or food).

This report could be solely about the collection. Favourite looks? The languid gold tailoring over a lurex cardigan and a greatcoat length MA-1. The word normcore was mentioned in passing, but really don’t dwell on it. If normcore is as ambitious as a glass of apple juice, wearing Casely-Hayford is a killer vintage champagne. In a taste test, most people would go for the finer stuff but might not be able to explain how or why. That attitude in a collection is more and more appealing, it strums both the heart and the mind. Joe and Charlie understand the vocabulary of semiotics and use it to sophisticated effect. These looks make you want to get to know their wearer.

Look 28

Casely-Hayford SS15: Look 28

Normcore is the very necessary reaction to dressing up like a badly decorated christmas tree, as hoards of show cloggers ruined fashion for everyone. It was necessary to separate oneself from those with cameras the wrong way round and a tumbleweed heart taking selfies all day. Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen chipped in on the subject by showing a swollen, wedge soled take on Stan Smiths with her immaculate abstract Kabuki pattern tailoring in houndstooth, birdseye and Prince of Wales check. Putting that suiting on would make a pedigree of anyone, and if you keep your trainers on the effect is intensified. Why try harder?

J.W. Anderson is another talent working with elements of the sublime – which he pairs with the awkward, just as the jazz on the Michel Gaubert-mixed soundtrack collided with earsplitting jungle rhythms. The line on those knotted, wrap pinstripe tops? Chic. Ditto the way fabrics were belted and held, fluid like water, stolen from a bourgeois woman. Chic is threatening in this context, because it is not a menswear word. And that’s exciting. Jonathan will have his way and that will change. The thing with innovators is that it’s the world’s duty to catch up.

Look 21

JW Anderson SS15: Look 21

What about permanence, stuff the dry cleaner won’t ruin, that you never take off?
Solange Azagury-Partridge, one of the most influential fine jewellers of the last 20 years, launched her stellar men’s collection with a film that told a contemplative Mark Ruffalo, pondering Rudyard Kipling’s If— after a heavy night out, to fuck off in green neon. Moments like this couldn’t make you love London more. Titled Alpha, evoking both the first and the top-dog, the collection is built around blackened gold, with viper rings, anatomical heart and phallic bullet and grenade pendants, each named after different types of men – Villain, Alpha, Caveman, Stud, Peacock. Powerful stuff from a designer full of potent ideas, there was also a bacon money clip in engraved silver. Clashing attitude and tradition, the music at Azagury-Partridge, just as at Casely-Hayford, was nice ’n’ loud too.

Check out our roundups of LC:M days one and three, plus Milan and Paris

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