Direction: Fashion Week Hair
For years, you’ve been able to get away with the most normative of buzz-cuts, its simplicity alluding to some kind of post-post-condition of self-styling, while also resembling the Gosha/Vetements-nexus in just the right way. Well honey, that time is over. Fall 2019 is all about actual hair-dos: whether long, short, or spotty, this year requires you to please just do something to that mane of yours. Feeling uninspired? Fear not. Our guide from Milan Men’s week that concluded just a few hours ago will give you plenty of ideas. Leopard dots, anyone?
FACEBOOK
GOOGLE
TWITTER
The Death of Mens' Fashion Week?
With this season’s men’s fashion month well on the way, we haven’t been able to ignore a growing trend. Or rather, the absence of one. Smaller shows, shorter programming days, in fact fewer days altogether. Men’s fashion week is shrinking all around – and is, in fact, increasingly occupied by women’s fashion. Doesn’t that seem to counter the growing menswear trend, you may ask? Indeed. Reports in recent years show that menswear, once the dark horse of fashion, is the fastest growing sector in the market, rapidly approaching womenswear as an equally valuable asset. In fact, rumors even claimed that at Balenciaga, led by menswear genius Demna Gvsalia, the revenue on men’s fashion has already overtaken that of women’s. So why are men’s fashion weeks in New York, London, Paris, and Milan – some of them less than 10 years old – shrinking or downright closing? The answer is found partially in the importance of menswear itself.
Want: Brik Terrazzo by KUF Studios
Cake isn’t exactly the kind of thing you’d usually associate with good design, nor see recommended by any fashion magazine in their right mind. The quirky world of chocolate, dessert, and gateau has never enjoyed the modern design revolution that it rightfully deserves, and is instead left to the most kitsch vices of any given culture with a sweet tooth—the kind of thing you learn love even though it’s awfully corny. That is, until now. A far cry from the cringe para-conceptualists of The Great British Bake-Off (and its countless regional spin-offs), the London/Copenhagen design studio KUF has for a couple of years been experimenting with up-chic’ed versions of Danish desert stables such as Flødeboller, but their latest product breaks another standard for what fashionable sweetness might look like. The new line Brik Terrazzo is inspired by the Italian art of tile-making – which is itself experiencing a revival among the global design constituency – only here, elevated into the world of heavenly eatable delights.
Final Gravity: Mikkeler and Femme Régionales launches sportswear bran
Running and drinking… beer? Hm. Not the obvious combination, but it might be your next. Brewer and former youth elite runner Mikkel Borg Bjergsoe is the innovative brain behind the new fashion fusion between Bjergsoe’s own microbrewery Mikkeller and design bureau Femmes Régionales.
Art Guide: OrtaMiklos @ Museu Marino Marini, Florence
With London Fashion Week just wrapped up, we head directly to Florence, where Pitti Uomo 95 is already in full action. The men’s fashion and trade week has been going on since the early 1970s, and has in the recent decade of menswear galvanization, become the most important event for men’s fashion globally. Perhaps, then, it’s not ideal to go if you, like us, are a bit tired of fashion; or rather, not ready for the endless desert walk that is fashion season. But fear not; there’s other things to do in Florence than eating pizza and watching Chinese tourists hurting each other with selfie sticks. For example, head to Museu Marino Marini, where the Italian art/design company Slam Jam will be celebrating its 30th anniversary with a grandiose program of exhibitions and events – including a show curated by the Milan-based art magazine KALEIDOSCOPE with the French/Danish design duo OrtaMiklos.
Best of London Fashion Week Men's FW19
While the kids are just about to sharpen their crayons, and return to the gilded halls of primary education, us fashion folks have already been up an running for a week. Even if January calls for serious hibernation and no alcohol, fashion screams louder, forcing us to dig out those tight Galliano pants and crack open a bottle of prosecco (thank god). It’s fashion week, in London. Once known as London Collections: Men, London Fashion Week Men’s has undergone an update in the latest seasons, slimming down its roster (and budget) but strengthening focus on its core trademark: young talent. From Art School to Mowalola, here’s some our favorite moments from the past 3 days of running around the East End trying to dodge street style photographers while not getting confused for the Spanish tourists on the “Jack the Ripper”-walking tour.
Calvin Klein Sans Raf and The Future of American Fashion
American fashion as always been a strange beast, not only to tame, but just to understand. The world’s biggest economy, spanning a vast continent of an incredibly diverse population, couldn’t be further from the upper-middle-class consumers of Europe, or the nouveau-riche clientele of the East. The most successful stories in American fashion consists of those that went to Europe (such as Proenza Schouler, Rick Owens) and those that went commercial: that is, into the world of mass-apparel. As the country’s most iconic brand Calvin Klein announces the departure of their Euro-chic creative director Raf Simons after only 18 months, is it time to reiterate the status quo of American fashion consumption? What is the future for our beloved CK?
Want: "Dictionary Dressings" by Femke de Vries
How do you really describe fashion? How do you sufficiently explain the meaning of clothes? This has been a conundrum for hundreds of years to scholars, philosophers, writers and critics. Thomas Carlyle‘s experimental novel Sartor Resartus (1834), about an intellectual trying to write the “philosophy of clothes,” was the first attempt, followed by the likes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Walter Benjamin. In the 60s, it was the French intellectual Roland Barthes who most satisfyingly made the attempt with his The Fashion System – a title that remains a bible today. But the perplexing difference between fashion, garment, and material object is still a perplexing mystery, a question unanswered. And writing isn’t always the only way to approach it. A recent book by the Dutch fashion researcher Femke de Vries makes a bold attempt, by looking at garment’s most basic definition: the dictionary.
The DANSK Guide to London Fashion Week Men's SS20
You’ve barely recovered from your New Years Eve shenanigans, and have not yet dared to open your clogged inbox, filled to the brim with insistent “Gently following up…”-e-mails from highly irritating colleagues and spam notifications about January Sales in shops you’ve never remembered shopping in. You’re still mourning your 2018 boyfriend, and have already broken your new year’s resolution. Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to 2019. When there’s no other place to look to for comfort, look to fashion: and this week, specifically, London Fashion Week Men’s SS20. Yes, it’s the first fashion week of the year, and this one is tight and punchy with lots of particularly emerging talents worth keeping an eye on. Here’s a couple of events, shows and names to look out for as London unveils what will (perhaps) be its last pre-Brexit men’s week – thank us later!
Launching: Tonsure x STORM
Don’t be mistaken: it’s not all mid-century designer furniture, bike culture, and the most extensive welfare system in the world that you’ll find in Copenhagen. Scratch the pristine, carefully branded utopia on the surface, and you’ll find an ocean of bizarre folkloric practices, working class malaise, and seriously dark humor. We’re talking eating mega-processed hotdogs, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes in one of the country’s bodegas hours on end, as if health directions of the past 25 years don’t apply to the Nordic natives. As you can well hear, we have a love-hate relationship to our low-brow culture, as does the rising menswear brand Tonsure. The Copenhagen label have both symbolically and materially interpreted the “stuff” of Danish culture in their ambitious collections, and approached it head-on when they launched a capsule collection with concept store Storm earlier this year honoring Copenhagen.
