As the first look came out we heard the unmistakable (if you’re old) “wah wah b-ding DING” twang of a dial-up connection being established. Paul Smith said his team had been rooting through his warehouse’s worth of archives in Nottingham—analog Googling—and in part this collection was the result of that. It connected shapes and styles that spanned three 30-year distant decades: the ’60s, the ’90s, and now the ’20s.
“Basically,” said Smith: “I was rethinking the suit…the poor old suit has quite a bad image; funerals, job interviews, financial guys, court appearances. But I think about it in a different way.” Using mostly British fabrics, Smith played Jenga with the traditional ensemble approach to suiting by subtracting jacket, shirt, and tie to leave just pants and waistcoat. As at Givenchy yesterday, this created an almost sporty silhouette, pared down and body-conscious. Elsewhere two models, one wearing a pale blue single breasted under a blue check raincoat, the other a mod-collar gray double breasted over a putty pink shirt and spotted tie, both carried their pants instead of wearing them to best show off boxer shorts made of shirting and suiting fabrics. Some of the suiting was cut in two-tone tonic fabric whose iridescent colors shifted according to the angle of the runway lighting and your eye. Others came in high twist lightweight wool Fresco.
Old school sneakers—inspired by physical training shoes from days of yore—were gridded with round perforations in honor of the Jacques Anquetil cycling shoes Smith used to wear as a young shaver. So too were the breezy oxfords that, along with closed-upper loafers with seamed toes, were variously worn south of the suiting. Some models wore cycling caps strapped to D-rings on their right hips. One waistcoat-only look was overprinted with a photo of morning light streaming through Venetian blinds that Smith had taken while having a lie-in.
The second half of the collection shifted beyond suiting—without phasing it out—to embrace military and workwear-informed looks that were in part inspired by David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The crepe soled suede monk strap desert boots were lovely in multiple colors, worn before roomy desert fatigues with cinching strapping. American-inspired workwear jackets were top-stitched with zig zag reinforcements and a great silk-mix tattersall check two-piece set came with an angled biker style pocket on the left pectoral. The closing prints were a blended collage of motifs from previous seasons, a literal articulation of Smith and his team’s mining of the past in order to recut and polish menswear jewels for the present.
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