“It’s done in a way that you can recognize the thing but you don’t,” said Hed Mayner this morning. He was referring to a pair of pants in his fall collection cut in leather and denim (washed blue and flocked), which he based on an abstraction of the classic Perfecto jacket, but he could have been referring to the whole thing.
The first hint of where Mayner was headed this season was his show location, the Christian de Portzamparc-designed Café Beaubourg, situated perpendicular to the Centre Pompidou and its defiant scaffolding and mold-breakingly colorful façade. The café, Mayner said, became a staple in the ’80s because it, like the museum, eschewed Parisian aesthetic tropes. “They avoided the classic,” Mayner explained, which could perhaps summarize this collection.
De Portzamparc’s Memphis-like design offered a respite from the classic Paris brasserie and, Mayner said, “offered the energy of a more New York-like café. There is this energy of creativity and starting from scratch,” Mayner said of what drew him to this location. But this time there was no ambiguity, he was also referring to his lineup.
This collection was sexier, looser, and, dare one say it, cooler. At face value it appeared to break no mold: The proportions were hefty and dwarfing, the colors neutral or adjacent, and the fabrics fine specimens of menswear classics (suitings, leathers, denims, shirtings). But up close they were completely different. (And up close we were, so much so that the protruding circular sleeve of a leather Perfecto, an actual jacket this time, graced this reviewer’s forehead as it turned at the end of the makeshift runway.)
If in the past Mayner’s clothes have appeared sometimes tender and melancholic, often stoic and, while not necessarily structured then certainly solid, this season he embraced fluidity. The gravitational center of his signature double-breasted jacket was lowered by chains sewn on the inside of the bodice and sleeves to weight its frame downward. A pair of suiting trousers appeared to be, but was not, cut with two flat pieces of fabric; this effect aided by the way the selvage of the material flopped and draped on the outside of each pant leg. (“This is a collection about technique,” Mayner said, so nothing was merely as simple as it reads.)
The idea behind these last was to “use the whole fabric and keep the thing complete.” Apropos, Mayner’s outerwear this season outlined some impressively patterned geometric circles, whether by the roundness of its sleeves (look 6), or by the generous volume that formed when a trench coat was belted and cinched or a bomber was worn with one’s hands in its pockets. “The gesture allows the clothes to exist,” Mayner said. (And what a sentence.) Here he utilized a pair of coats made of blanket knit fabric as a prime example: They can be worn the classic way or as presented this morning, with one’s head poking through an interior storm yoke that falls on the shoulders like a shawl.
Mayner was looking to design gestures into his clothes within the frame of classic materials—which he also intervened, with paint and plaster and flocking. But his quest in broad strokes seemed to be more about reflecting on how these gestures can alter something’s—or someone’s—core. “It’s about a new way of presenting yourself that is complex and individual, but still with strength and energy,” Mayner concluded. It’s done in a way you can recognize the person but you don’t.