The Fashion Week Shows Were Good. The Designers’ Outfits Were Great.
Dries Van Noten once told me, ““Being a fashion designer, it’s decisions from the early morning until late in the evening. I have a uniform to save my energy for more important things than getting dressed.” As always, Dries knows best. Aside from the rare fashion freaks who create for themselves — Rick Owens, Thom Browne, Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour — nearly all designers opt for an easy, anonymous uniform. But, because these are fashion designers, their most ordinary looks are guided by trained eyes. They’re interesting even at their most pedestrian — or, especially at their most pedestrian.
This conversation is typically invoked about the legends of fashion: designers who long ago established both their own labels and a method of consistent dress. But the Dries Van Notens and the Phoebe Philos of the world are vaunted enough. Fewer people are picking up on how great it is to see this tradition upheld by newer designers, with the guys who create Coperni’s crazy clothes clad in classic shirt-and-jeans and Raul Lopez wearing perfectly fitted frames with a T-shirt to match. This is the contemporary artists’ uniform. And at the most recent fashion weeks, they were so good that they rivaled the strongest shows.
In the past few weeks, Jil Sander creative director Simone Bellotti, perpetually topped by a dusty grey Detroit Tigers hat, looked absurdly sharp in a tucked-in long-sleeved tee, straight-legged black jeans, and moc-toed leather boots. Cecilie Bahnsen epitomized her eponymous label’s effortless grace with just a white tee and opaque floral skirt. The ordinary outfit worn by Paloma Wool founder Paloma Lanna was all but superseded by those of her kids, accented by a child-sized handbag. Matthieu Blazy’s much-hyped Chanel debut may have been the main event, but runner-up had to be his laidback, lived-in jeans and unhyped Nike trainers. And Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough accepted the crowd’s applause looking less like LOEWE’s new creative directors than Ralph groupies in their semi-matching Polo RL T-shirts.
If Ralph is the patron saint of good style, Jonathan Anderson is normcore incarnate. At the end of his Dior women’s debut, he took a bow in his typical snug navy sweater and narrow blue dad jeans. This is uniform dressing as a signature, down to Anderson’s anti-trend sneakers. In this case, the designer replaced his cheesy Nikes and elderly On sneakers with Salomon trail shoes — not the cool kind, but the ones you’d find marked down at REI.
This is all cool because it is not cool, and these are great outfits because they aren’t aiming to hit anyone else’s mark. Great outfits are born of great style, and great style is selfish.
Compare Anderson’s look to the outfits that Ralph Lauren wore to his runway shows in the mid-’00s. If Lauren’s giant, destroyed jeans were regarded at all, they were considered a rare miss from one of America’s style paragons. Now, they’re so prescient that they’re worthy of direct mention on the Ralph Lauren website. In this way, these fashion designers’ looks have the potential to be even more lasting than those that grace the catwalk. Because that is fashion, but this is style.
