Clothes Too Real for the Runway
You'd expect that most designers aspire to present new collections during one of the many regimented fashion weeks atop a catwalk, quite literally pedestaling their clothes above the audience. This isn't any mere garment, or so the runway show implies. This is art. This is luxury. This is unattainable and exclusive.
Camiel Fortgens, meanwhile, held his very first on-calendar Paris Fashion Week runway show on the street.
Fortgens hit the message home by later placing models on treadmills against a quotidian but farcical backdrop, again reiterating the absurdity of the runway spectacle. Like several other quality creatives mercifully shaking up the stiffness of fashion week, Camiel Fortgens' clothes are meant to be worn. (several years ago, Fortgens' showroom hosted a "runway show" in a similarly-minded send-up of Paris' staid catwalks and, tellingly, it co-starred Evan Kinori, fellow Good Clothes Maker)
The young Dutch designer's imprint is just over a decade old. In that time, Fortgens' approach to unpretentiously revisionary clothing has been honed to a platonic ideal, raking plaudits from ear-to-ground garmentos in California, Tokyo, Seoul, and his' native Amsterdam, where the Camiel Fortgens flagship store opened just about a year ago.
Laudably, even as Fortgens has advanced his design language to tackle ever more advanced propositions, he's never abandoned the real-deal wearable as his guiding star.
Just about every item of Camiel Fortgens clothing is of the toss-on-and-go variety, his no-frills naming scheme — signature items include "'70s Cardigans," "Simple Jackets," "Big Tees," and "Suit Pants" — reflective of the goods' utilitarian inspirations.
Even when Fortgens twists a collar or leaves a seam's stitching raw or blows up a coat into a cocoon, the end product is remains a wardrobe staple. It's just been viewed askew, tilted to highlight its intentional make or confront norms of silhouette and proportion.
And so, Fortgens' clothes belong on the street, strolling past other clothes — maybe even their forebears. Cleverly, the models in Fortgens' SS26 show clutched portable speakers to provide the presentation's soundtrack, drawing eyes to the sunfaded T-shirts and super-size stacked shirts.
Fortgens' knowingly playful styling, with wild wigs and dissected footwear, only emphasized the purposefulness undergirding it all. With clothes as classic as they are considered, why not have a little fun? After all, is that not the entire point of getting dressed?
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