A star of London men’s week, Danish designer Astrid Andersen said she didn’t move in a specific direction this season, describing her collection instead as a “mood board come to life,” with an homage to Eighties London youth culture and the era’s Buffalo collective of artists, models, stylists and musicians.
Her collection was as shiny and bright as a new pound coin but with a tough edge: Puffer jackets glittered with gold piping or zippers while tracksuits were jazzed up with shiny silk jacquard, plaids and checks, and a long, snuggly sweater coat sparkled with silvery threads.
Although it was technically a men’s collection, Andersen also teased some of her fall women’s designs, which will make their debut on Feb. 1 at Copenhagen Fashion Week. The result was a wild gender mash-up with men in kilts and transparent lace tops and women in swooshy silk trousers and shiny, gold and black oversize hoodies.
Somehow, in the space of about 10 minutes, all of it coalesced into a thing of beauty, an ageless, genderless frolic that put a smile on many faces on a cold January night at the Old Selfridges Hotel.
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It was a collection that captured the January zeitgeist: Christopher Raeburn’s fall outing was built around fabrics fit for the Arctic, secondhand blankets and wool fabric disguised as shearling.
With temperatures still below freezing and Niagara Falls a wall of ice, what better moment to send out coats made from chunky neon Neoprene and Russian naval military blankets?
Called “Immerse,” the collection was all about a plunge into cold water, but rather than sending chills down anyone’s spine, London’s king of upcycling and recycling turned out a collection that was all about protection, warmth, layering and comfort.
Among the standouts of this handsome collection were orange Neoprene coats — long and short — that came with matching gloves that dangled from cuffs; intarsia sweaters, some with albatrosses flapping across the front, others with squid patterns, and gray and white coats made from blankets covered in boxy Soviet-era patterns.
Comforting puffers, done in collaboration with Finisterre, did their bit to keep things cozy, as did helicopter jackets, which Raeburn sourced from Britain’s Royal Air Force.
While the designer spends most of his time wondering how to give supply fabrics and military cast-offs a new life, he hasn’t given up on new textiles entirely. Honorable mention goes to
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Alex Mullins employed a high-minded concept to achieve the right balance between the formal and the creative.
With the relationship between the right and left functions of the brain in mind, Mullins brought together the logical and the emotional to create a strong, intriguing lineup that felt relevant to the way modern men dress.
The looks proved that opposites do attract: Smart suits, as in a pinstripe double-breasted blazer and matching high-waisted pants, were paired with deconstructed shirting that featured large cutouts and tie-dye graphics.
Among the most striking pieces were a series of jacket and trousers combinations with pieces of smashed ceramic plates sewn on them. “I wanted to visualize thinking with these broken, fragmented ideas,” the designer mused.
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Designer Marina Cortbawi has been continuing to focus on Merlette’s brand DNA of airy, cotton dresses and separates with signature hand-embroidered details. For Collection 4, the styles grew in number with new tops, dresses and pants. Ellsworth Kelly’s lithographs of negative space and plants inspired both the palette — Malaki green and petal pink with black, white and navy — as well as the textures. Cortbawi infuses the illusion of print via her hand-embroidered details, like a dress with shadow embroidery or bias cut fille coupe striped Italian poplin dress, each offered in multiple colors. Hand smocked and tiered ruffles, basket weave smocking, Victorian sleeves and ruched wrists made for new additions to the cotton silhouettes. The lot was sensibly paired over high-waisted, wide-leg tonal cotton trousers, perfect for the pre-fall season. Cortbawi is also strategically adding updated colorways to classics, like an oversize, Malaki green tiered wrap dress, in order to build her customers’ ideal wardrobes. The approach is to grow sensibly by keeping the line tight and listening to her customers’ feedback — and it’s clearly working. Since the last collection, the brand has grown from 80 to 130 individual shops in Japan, in addition to launching on Matchesfashion.com.
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TAKE TWO: Jonathan Anderson packed photographer Alasdair McLellan off to Northern Ireland for their second collaboration on the designer’s Workshops line, a series of monthly collaborations between Anderson and a lineup of fellow creatives that he calls “kindred spirits,” the fruits of which are available at a retail space next to the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, London.
“I love doing [these collaborations] because it’s my micro-project and more about accessibility and the idea of trying to bring a newness of the time in a way that is actually personal to me,” Anderson told WWD. “This shop is an experiment for me, it was always meant to be, we are now embarking on a new year of working with different ceramist, poets, artists, photographers and archives.”
Within this McLellan collaboration are items including T-shirts, key rings, mugs, stickers, puzzles, badges and posters featuring exclusive photographs by him of models and Northern Irish landscapes.
J.W. Anderson x Alasdair McLellan
Courtesy Photo
“Alasdair went to Northern Ireland, where I come from, and he shot all the different landmarks that I knew as a kid. The Mourne Mountains, the Giant’s Causeway, the Falls Road…” said Anderson, adding that this was far from McLellan’s first foray into Ireland.
“Alasdair has always
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The women will wear black.
But why?
The stated purpose behind the call for women to dress in black at tonight’s Golden Globes Awards is to protest sexual harassment in entertainment and other industries. It’s part of Time’s Up, the sweeping anti-harassment program spearheaded by many of Hollywood’s most powerful women. The initiative includes seeding a legal fund to benefit low-income victims of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace.
From the moment the first Harvey Weinstein story broke in The New York Times in October, this awards season was destined to be like no other. The Globes are the first of the major awards, and the hours-long, on-camera parade to the mics couldn’t happen without acknowledgement that the entertainment industry has been rocked to its core and forced into a new, in-progress way of conducting business.
But why the de facto dress code? Does asking women to converge to a visual norm strengthen their message about forcing change? Or does it infringe on the embrace of diversity, restricting to a degree the creativity involved in dress selection? Absent a clearly articulated explanation (and I haven’t found one), a few “whys” seem plausible. Sartorial sameness has long been employed as a tool of group protest, in photos
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In the shadow of the Coliseum, where the Rams have not played a playoff game in 39 seasons, the most devoted of diehards, dressed in their throwback yellow and blues, can’t help but smile and wonder. A year ago, a playoff berth was no more than an impossible dream.
But that feels like an eternity ago now, as a surreal celebration is underway on the blacktop of Lot 2. Music is blaring. The smell of barbecue is in the air. The beer is flowing, selfies are being snapped, and the mood is electric. Strangers pass and toast red cups, flashing the same stunned look. How did we get here? They all seem to wonder.
The euphoria will wear off in the hours to come, as the Rams’ comeback efforts fell short against the Falcons, their playoff party ending after just one wild night. But even the wildest of optimists in Lot 2 will admit, long before the result is final, that they never expected to be here at all. Not only did the Rams return to the postseason, where the franchise hadn’t been since 2004, they hosted a playoff game in Southern California for the first time since Jan. 4, 1986.
That day, the Rams shut out the Cowboys, 20-0, in Anaheim. Three weeks later, Sean McVay, the wunderkind coach behind the Rams’ revival, was born.
Mark Millsap was in the Anaheim Stadium stands for that final playoff game in the Southland. He wore an Eric Dickerson jersey and watched as the Rams back tore through the Dallas defense for 248 yards. Eight years later, when the Rams moved to St. Louis, Millsap drew a red line through the middle of that jersey in a fit of rage.
He never imagined then that they might return. But 32 years later, Millsap stood on the blacktop in a hard hat outfitted with Rams horns, wearing the jersey of Dickerson’s heir apparent, Todd Gurley. As the party carries on around him, he turns to his son, Mark, who, like the Rams coach, wasn’t born the last time the Rams played a playoff game in Southern California. Now, though, father and son are together amid this euphoric sea of Rams jerseys, and Millsap can’t help but wonder if the decades of exile were all leading to this.
“I think it was meant to be,” Millsap says.“I was thinking about that today. If they would’ve never left, we wouldn’t have Sean McVay. Everything would be different. It all fell into place. It came full circle.”
Here, at this tailgate, there’s plenty of talk of destiny. It’s the only explanation that seems to justify how this turnaround came to be, but inside the Coliseum, the sentimentality fades into the ecstasy of the moment.
Since the Rams return, questions of whether the team might ever catch on in the city have raged on. But on this particular night, the buzz in the building is at a fevered pitch, as game time approaches. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner who presided over the Rams return, walks the first row of bleachers obliging autographs and snapping selfies. Goodell’s presence at most NFL stadiums often elicits boos, but here, the sentiment in the building leaves no room for negativity.
One poster Goodell signs reads “Why not us? Why not now?” And until the final whistle blew and the team’s charmed season met its end, it certainly felt like this night belonged to the Rams. Before the game, as a Kendrick Lamar bass line quaked through the entire bowl, fans danced on bleachers across the stadium. Players bounced to the beat as they stretched. It wasn’t until the game started that their energy turned anxious and frenetic.
Rams legends, from Eric Dickerson to Torry Holt to Steven Jackson, lined the sidelines. Celebrities made appearances. Snoop Dogg performed at halftime, rapping in a suitable fog of smoke, splicing the Rams name into a medley of his greatest hits. It was one hell of a party, in a city that lives for such nights.
Eric Dickerson signs autographs for fans before the Los Angeles Rams takes on the Atlanta Falcons in a wild card game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, Saturday, January 6, 2018. (Photo by Thomas R. Cordova Daily News/SCNG)
For the diehards who gathered hours earlier on Lot 2, it was a culmination.
“We stuck it out all of these years,” said Dave Stanley, one of the original members of the Rams’ fan group, the Melonheads. “We hung with the Rams. Now, it’s all worth it.”
For the rest of Los Angeles? Only time will tell whether the Rams have won them over. A long playoff run might’ve gone a long way towards making that a reality.
But for one night, the apathy and empty seats were a distant memory. The playoff drought was over. After 32 years, the NFL postseason returned, however briefly, to Los Angeles. And after a miraculous, one-year turnaround for the Rams, it seems clear that the city won’t have to wait much longer to experience it again.
