The fashion industry is built on biases and everyone involved has their own. One of my personal biases is big-time in favor of Hed Mayner, the Israeli designer who won LVMH's inaugural Karl Lagerfeld Prize in 2019.
I adore Hed Mayner's eponymous brand, it's everything I look for in clothing, like huge silhouettes, breezy fabrics, and loads of washed-out jeans.
I don't know why I have such a soft spot for faded indigo and black denim but I just do. Oh, and that ENCENS magazine founder Samuel Drira contributes his masterful styling to the Hed Mayner runways and editorials is the cherry on top. I love.
Hed Mayner has never made it terribly easy to actually get into his brand — besides the imposing prices and extreme proportions, Mayner's brand used to be stocked at hardly any places outside of Korea and Japan — but he's really expanded his output in the past few years, gaining big-name supporters like SSENSE and Bergdorf Goodman and even debuting his most commercial effort yet for Fall/Winter 2023: a collaboration with Reebok.
Mayner's Reebok collaboration continues for Spring/Summer 2024, as the designer squashes and softens Reebok's BB 5600 sneaker to better suit the soft, flowing lines of his reshaped Reebok track suit. There's also a funky slipper and boot co-created with century-old Maine shoemaker Quoddy, typically known for its boat shoes.
If these collaborations serve as gateway drugs to Mayner's mainline fare, all the better. His stunning, blown-up angler's vests, torso-swallowing shirts, and signature pleated jeans are worthy of a wider audience.
In fact, as a whole, Hed Mayner SS24 sorta resembles Serge Gainsbourg's wardrobe if it got caught in a black hole.
Classic menswear bits — the timeless striped shirt, the knitted sweater, the blazer — are warped, inverted, flipped inside-out, rendered in Tyvek.
In fact, Hed Mayner's material experimentation may have peaked for SS24, what with all the foil-bonded suits, double-layered outerwear, and garments fitted with internal wires that allow them to be reconstructed to the wearer's whim as living, wearable sculptures.
One tight-fitting top, laden with internal pockets, was sent down the runway with myriad rectangular shapes stuffed in each niche. The end result looked like the model had broken out with brick-shaped chicken pox.
This is the experimental side of Hed Mayner, the one that delights in confrontational clothes that almost defy commercial endeavor. Don't let Mayner fool you: his clothes are brilliantly graceful, imminently wearable, and deserving of much more love than they currently receive.
